Time Bound

This was the post I was planning on writing last Thursday before I had such an incredibly stressful day at work. Although maybe it was fortuitous because I saw this story and video this morning, which fit perfectly. This coming Monday is going to be another humdinger of a day, but hopefully once I make it through that day, things will return to the normal, "how am I going accomplish everything I've been tasked with?" type of stress.

The weather forecasters were telling us to expect a big snow storm in Denver this weekend, with up to 18 inches of snow. We had about 3 or 4 inches of snow when I woke up, and then there was a break in the system.

My husband tells me that this morning when I was in the shower, the sun came out briefly and lit up the snow-covered trees against the dark sky. Man, I wish I could have seen that. This afternoon it started snowing and blowing again. It's supposed to snow until tomorrow evening now that it's started up again. I realize this looks like less snow than this morning on the deck rail, but it's just because it's so windy now.

This weather, and my recent extreme fatigue have really started me thinking about how much modern society is bound by the calendar and the clock. I think that we lose track of the rhythms of our body and nature when we're so focused on measuring the passage of time, rather than experiencing the passage of time. This is actually one of the reasons I enjoy photography so much, because it keeps me focused on and in tune with nature's cycles.

I read a book once called The Weigh Down Diet which was written by a very religious nutritionist. One of the things she talked about that really resonated with me is that we listen to our bodies when we need to go to the bathroom or go to sleep, but we don't listen to our bodies when we need fuel. We just use the clock or social cues to feed our bodies. I think we're reaching a point though where we don't listen to our bodies for much of anything anymore. The video in the link in the first paragraph above explains this better than I ever could. I believe that this obsession with time is really creating problems for us as humans because we don't evolve as fast as technology. So we go through life fatigued and overweight because we're doing things on society's schedule instead of listening to what our bodies need.

When I woke up last Thursday morning, I was purely exhausted and my body was trying to get me to slow down and rest with nausea and achiness. But I couldn't listen to my body because there were meetings on my calendar and tasks on my to do list so I just had to keep going. I love the snow and winter time, especially when I can stay home and not have to venture out which is unsafe and uncomfortable. But we don't listen to nature any longer either, so I'll be heading out to work on Monday regardless of how big this storm turns out to be.

 There are things that I love about modern life. I love having a device in my pocket with more computing power than MIT had on its entire campus a couple of decades ago. I love being able to immediately find out about anything that I'm interested in. I love being able to use Excel because I can do much more math more quickly that way. I'm very appreciative of modern medicine and many other conveniences of modern society. But I still sometimes wonder if it's all worth what we've given up.

I'd really like to do one of those experiments where I went a year without calendars or clocks, to see if slept better and lost weight. Unfortunately I live a lifestyle which doesn't allow for such an extreme experiment. So my charge is to figure out how to live within the constraints of my calendar and clock, while still listening to my body and giving it what it needs, instead of what the clock says it should have.