I haven’t had to dress well for work in over 20 years, with smart casual being as fancy as ever needed. Mostly my uniform of choice has been jeans and a t-shirt, maybe leather shoes if necessary. But a combination of working alone and the pandemic has created a whole new level of comfort. Sweat pants, comfy sandals and running socks are now the norm for me. I get some looks from other olds like myself when I’m shopping for groceries, but I could care less. This habit is here to stay.
Acknowledging my gift for over-stating the obvious: the constant machinations of COVID-19 on Prince Edward Island sure is distracting. I’m still getting my work done …but barely.
I wrote this missive on our company Instagram account, replete with the required photo:
January has been my least favorite month for as long as I can remember, and my view on winter in general has always been that it’s best experienced from the inside of a warm home or on a tropical beach.
Further restrictions by the CPHO this month has meant my plans to increase indoor fitness activities have been put on hold, and daily trips for coffee cancelled.
To keep healthy mentally and physically I plan on:
❄️ getting outside as much as I can bear – including running on trails,
❄️ reading more,
❄️ have an increased focus on sound nutrition,
❄️ and follow along with the excellent coaching from @782fitness for daily workoutsI might also spend a bit more time working than I should.
The goal is to continue pushing forward despite all the roadblocks put in our way.
Sometimes a change in perspective, attitude, or direction takes ages to occur. This time for me it took a short afternoon nap. When I woke I decided to stop letting external events affect me to the degree they had been, and treat them as simply another challenge to be overcome.
“Keep this thought at the ready at daybreak, and through the day and night—there is only one path to happiness, and that is in giving up all outside of your sphere of choice, regarding nothing else as your possession, surrendering all else to God and Fortune.”
EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES , 4.4.39
I told Sheryl the other day that I have been studying some of the wisdom of the stoics. Nothing serious, just some choice quotes and explanations.
This was at a time when after shovelling out all the walkways, so people could exit the building after the storm, (the people responsible never wake before noon, and take a couple days to get started) and shovelling and salting our parking spot clean, someone had the rudeness to take our parking spot. They came out later and moved the car without a hint of care.
This precipitated a boomer-like rant about selfish-individualism and the lack of empathy in people, laziness, and on and on.
We both agreed that perhaps more study was needed. My son simply stated that I needed to chill. He’s not wrong.
I felt a range of emotions yesterday as I listened to the news reports announcing new restrictions on what we are allowed to do. I had arrived at another gym, which I just joined for the winter in an effort to not only keep mentally and physically healthy but prepare for some competitions in the summer and fall, while I am still able.
Like many I am tired, and like some I am angry. I have no more patience.
When this all started two years ago, it was perplexing as to how people refused to wear masks or wash their hands or follow common sense health guidance. When the vaccine came, it was mesmerizing how people had collective amnesia with regards to the litany of shots they already have HAD to receive. I realized that most don’t have our frame of reference, having lived through SARS and various other outbreaks in a society that respects health professionals and trusts government. These measures and more feel normal to us. We have improved.
Being a small place surrounded by water with restricted points of entry we seemed to do well. Round-abouts were built, hockey rinks announced, pay raises for government were approved, and most importantly few got sick. Like before, you still needed to wait 6 months to get an ingrown toe nail clipped, and years to see a paediatric specialist. Life was as it was but with the added regime of limiting your contacts or booking your time in a gym (travel was somewhat a no no).
I assumed that like health care professionals, and many others, surely the government has been working to exhaustion to prepare for an outbreak, right?
That assumption has proven to be patently false.
It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of priorities and competence. My son today cannot attend school, cannot train in the pool, and cannot go to his CrossFit gym. But he is free to add more shifts at his service job. He is safe while increasing the profits for corporate but not while preparing himself for the future? Not a good look.
I see no strategy or long term plan, only tactics. If there is one, it isn’t being communicated which is in itself another failure.
A crisis is a sure test of leadership for which this provinces leadership is failing. Now I turn this angst to something productive, the one thing we can do, work, at least until election time, when I hope to devote myself to making sure these people don’t continue to serve.
I don’t always sleep well and despite for years expending effort on other areas of my mental and physical health it has remained a problem.
Lately the problem has been compounded by frequent nightly visits to the toilet, which I find incredibly annoying but have come to accept as it’s largely out of my control. A recent blood test has shown no cause for concern. To help, I resist my night time love of fruit and limit my night time fluid intake.
I’ve tried intense exercise, relaxation techniques, stretching, listening to music, reading and other activities in an effort to improve my sleep, nothing has shown consistent results. What has been working is simply forcing myself to stay in bed longer, to not adhere to a set schedule. The kids are old enough to take care of themselves and I have the luxury of setting my own work schedule. This hasn’t meant sleeping in until noon unfortunately, that’s a talent I lost when I stopped being a teenager, but it has meant that when I wake up at 3 or 4am alert and ready to start my day, I force myself to lay there for an hour. Eventually I fall back to sleep until sometime between 6 – 7am, which is sleeping in for me.
We introduce visualization techniques to kids on one of our podcasts and I have found that useful as well. If during one of my frequent trips to the bathroom I find my mind focusing on thoughts of the upcoming day, I switch my thinking to a calm and relaxing place, an imaginary place for me. That place lately has been a small room full of books, with a fire place, and a comfortable leather chair.
It’s been working most nights.
Apples Focus mode is useful if not overcomplicated feature which I use frequently. I find it useful when I am working to set do not disturb on my Mac so that I can respond to messages and notifications when I feel it’s appropriate. And at night so that annoying email messages are not coming through on my phone. Unfortunately, “Share Across Devices” located in Settings > Focus is enabled by default, which has meant numerous missed calls on my phone (our doorbell rings my phone so that I can speak to whoever is at the door, usually a courier).
To stop this syncing
Open the Settings app
Just above Screen Time, tap Focus
“Share Across Devices” — tap the toggle to turn it off
I have been at the office subsisting on Maxwell house instant coffee of late so it was an absolute treat to enjoy a cup of pour over at The Shed this morning. Having a cup of coffee where you can not only smell but taste the overtones is a brilliant (re)start to the day. There are a number of places in town to have an ok tasting expresso but no place I have been dedicates itself solely to great tasting coffee. We are so lucky to have her.
My son read my Twitter posts recently and he and his girlfriend let me know that I seem salty all the time. This comes on the heals of being told that I seem too serious and don’t smile enough.
The Twitter that I am subject to is full of vitriol, virtue signalling, and an endless stream of all that is wrong with the world. With the exception of virtue signalling (many local companies/orgs. with social media chops pat themselves on the back endlessly), I thought I fit in.
I take their comments to heart and hope to share the brighter side of me, if I can find it. Except for here, where I will continue to crank.
Likely the best thing I can do for my mental health is simply delete all my social media – even Instagram, where I am flooded with videos of rich food and extremely fit people, a weird dichotomy which helps create unrealistic expectations.
I can’t delete Twitter entirely unfortunately, but like Facebook before, I’ll just stop showing up and be all the happier as a result.
I’ve long felt that New Years resolutions were nonsense and more a way to make yourself feel bad about what you didn’t accomplish than setting achievable goals.
On New Years Day Sheryl shared what we did on that day four years ago. We ran a race together sponsored by ChaTime (the same chain in Charlottetown), then went to see a movie at Big City, followed by Cheesecake and Latté’s at Ink, our favorite café at that time.
5 years ago I ran the Xiamen Marathon and spent New Years Eve alone in a hotel bar.
I enjoy how Facebook, Apple photos and DayOne give us a chance to remember or relive the past. It’s a valuable feature for me but it’s becoming evident that we spend too much time reminiscing, and not enough time creating new memories. Granted there is much more to do in a place like Hsinchu than say Charlottetown, the Island is a sleepy place, not a bustling Asian city surrounded by mountains and beaches. We led a full life before returning home, and now with the exception of our first year here, our default seems to do more work, which includes my son, who has a part time job, is on the swim team, and is part of our CrossFit crew.
We don’t expend enough effort trying to find something to do together, no matter how simple the activity may be.
My daughter is starting to get it. Unlike other local youth her age she has no interest in bars and drinking, or house parties and such. On New Years Eve she said she was going to go out with friends for a drive to the beach and later sit and talk at the park. At the time I thought it rather odd, but later realized this is exactly the kind of activity that is possible here, the kind of activity that helps build new memorable experiences.
On the podcast Stay Tuned with Preet, Scott Galloway talked about how he takes the month of August off and travels with his family to Europe. Now, he’s rich, and I’m most certainly not, but Sheryl and I used to do the same. One year we spent the summer traveling Europe, many summers afterwards we would spend time on a Canoe Cove beach. Scott talks about how he will never regret taking time away from work to spend with his family – a common refrain from anyone with the ability to do so and a modicum of foresight.
I have little to report about the past year. This is in part due to COVID (and Canada’s lack of a coordinated response), but we really could have done more. Much more.
I’m not going to call this a resolution as that’s just framing for failure, but I will commit to spend more time in 2022 creating more memories with family and outside of work.
