(Recent) Lessons Learned

Call this one a quasi-follow up to the Decision Tree posting.

I'm sitting here at 8:57pm, trying to write this, but alas, I have little energy for the endeavor.  That's a good as any segue to the list.

In no particular order.

1) My Bandwidth
It isn't ever expanding, and things get weird when I really try to push beyond my means.  I've been running at about 120% for a while now, and I'm none the better for it.  Now this doesn't mean that I've been going 24/7, but it does mean that I've got so many things going on that when I do have some down-time, I'm simply too tired do anything.  It's a wonder that I've been able to keep up with the blog.  I feel oddly pushed by an assortment of things.  Some of the things are really good...really, really good...some not so good...but more so it's just that there have been so, so many of them lately.  And they all require bandwidth.

2) Fun Time
I think I am forgetting to have fun.  I was driving home yesterday thinking to myself "what little things do I do for fun?", and I really couldn't think of an answer.  How sad.  There are things I like to do, but I just don't make time for them on a regular basis.

3) Sleep
As in I am not getting enough.  I've always done that, as in not getting enough sleep, but when coupled with the "too many irons in the fire" thing, it gets worse.  I keep telling myself that I am going to bed earlier, but being in bed and actually getting to sleep are two distinctly different things.  Regardless of what time I go to bed I seem to always be up between 5:30-6:30am.

4) Physically
I feel physically just awful.  Rotten.  Bloated.  I can't seem to make the time to get to the gym regularly anymore, and my eating habits are getting horrible again.  I am suffering for daily headaches, mostly because, I think, I'm not wearing my glasses consistently.  I don't wear my glasses consistently because they give me headaches.  See where this is going?


I know the above is a pretty morbid read, but in reality there are a lot of things are going well.  See #1.  It's just that I really and truly need to learn how to better pace myself.

One would think that, at (nearly) age 51 I would have this stuff figured out, but that would be wrong.  Am I going to be this way when I'm 61?  71?  I hope not, but then again a lot of what we put on our own shoulders we do, in fact, put on our own shoulders.  I need to work on the off-loading bit.

In the interim, here's some thematic music, courtesy of Joe Walsh.



I really love this song by the way.  Joe Walsh is a very clever song-writer, in addition to being a terrific guitar player.

Speaking of guitar, one of the things that I've always wanted to do was to learn to play.  I even had a guitar once, but that got loaned out a few years ago.  Maybe once the continual crisis abates I should think about picking that up again.  This time around I happen to know a really, really good teacher.