My quality of life, part 4

Yesterday, I said discipline improved my life the most. Sickness gave me motivation to change, but sustaining that motivation was difficult because I was missing what turns out to be an important tool.

Patience

I was led to the following conclusion: I needed patience. Prior to my hospitalization, I would have been dismissive of this. But my serious lack of health put me in a serious frame of mind, and so I decided to treat the idea seriously and to explore ways to obtain it. How did I use patience in my daily life otherwise? Maybe I was already exercising patience in ways I didn't realize, and that would help me make some comparisons and better strategize.

My daily routine

I would get up and eat, usually in a rush because I had stayed up into the wee hours and was running late for work. Maybe I wouldn't eat at all if I was late enough. I would wait on the bus, I supposed, for 30 minutes. That's a sort of patience, right? Well, I had little choice. Distance has inescapable qualities, it turns out. Okay, I'm at work. I'm programming. There's deadlines. I'm rushing to meet them. Lunch can't arrive quickly enough. Waiting for lunch is patience, right? Lunch comes and goes and I'm working again, rushing like before. I need to be done yesterday. I have a bad track record with deadlines, so I usually work late. I take the bus home eventually, half-relieved and half-exhausted. Arriving home, I do what I want. I eat what I want, as much as I want. I watch whatever I want. Anything I want to do, I pretty much do it. Activities such as trips to the grocery store might require patience, I guess, but I classified them more as annoyances. I stay up late, because I want as much of all that as I can get. Which of course feeds into the next day, with the lateness and the rushing all over again. That was my standard day. Ultimately, when I mulled it over, most of what I did, I did in a hurry. And when left to my own devices, most of what I did was as a direct result of whim or a desire for immediate satisfaction. "I'm hungry!" "I'm bored." And the ever-popular "I'm bored. Time to eat!"

Less frequent happenings

So, little patience to be found in my day-to-day. What sort of things did I wait for that took more than a day? Paychecks came every two weeks, though again, not something I had much control over. I could stockpile cash for cool gadgets, but honestly I hardly ever did so. If I wanted something, I bought it ASAP. I used credit if necessary. Holidays rolled around every so often, though usually they came as a surprise, since I was always neck-deep in work. I remember coming to work on numerous occasions, not having realized we had the day off. The list goes on but, no, I realized patience wasn't part of my life.

Orange skin

While the idea of patience scuttled around in the back of my mind, I was otherwise mostly occupying my time by actively reading many "get healthy" books. You come across a lot of bizarre and fascinating stories when reading literature about ailments and how to heal them, but one example that stood out for me was to do with consuming too many carrots. In high enough quantities and in long enough duration, your skin can actually turn orange. It's not dangerous, it's just funny. However, it was also something of an epiphany for me. This made much more "real" to me the fact that our bodies are constantly growing and rebuilding themselves out of what we eat and drink. And that those choices can have very material effects. Further, that it takes time -- orange skin doesn't happen if you decide to "O.D. on carrots" one day. It takes frequent and prolonged exposure. And so, it seemed obvious to me at that point that any changes I wanted to occur in my own body would take equally diligent application. And certainly it would take much more time than the daily or even bi-monthly cycles of "patience" that I was accustomed to.

Cake & steaks

This gave me a sort of ruler to help gauge what sorts of foods I should eat, and how frequently I should eat them. What would happen if I ate nothing but chocolate cake for an entire month? How would I feel? What if I ate nothing but steaks? What would it feel like to be built out of, say, apples? I had my own idea about how different things would affect me, but I actually started putting it to the test. I wanted to find some staple foods to base most of my diet on, so my criteria became this: I should be able to eat something, almost exclusively, for weeks at a time and feel well. If any food caused me significant physical discomfort after prolonged exposure, I would stop eating it. FYI, cake and steaks lost (after about three days and frequent chest-clutching.) As some of my friends and coworkers know, apples won a month-long round, and continue to be a staple of mine.

Run with it.

I'm not going to dispute I was a bit crazy due to my willingness to explore extremes in this way (remember those steep slopes I mentioned?), but there was and is a method to my madness and it has provided me with numerous valuable insights about my body's needs and limitations. The interesting thing to me, looking back over the past 6 years, is that the basis for most of what has become my "health rationale" came from the idea of "orange skin." It was just this curious edge-case scenario I read about once, yet it was novel enough that I kept revisiting it, and it became a focal point through which I developed many personally useful ideas and tools. If I were to offer advice on maintaining motivation, it would be to find something personally interesting and milk it for all it's worth. Perhaps obvious, but super effective. It's kind of amazing what sort of mileage you can get out of even simple ideas. Maybe one day you'll be able to blog about how orange skin taught you patience.