Week 67
View from the houseboats
Arguably, my pacing has been off this week.
I’ve had early morning meetings nearly every day this week, and I’m pleased that I’ve managed to motivate to get up at 5am with Sam to fit in some exercise (and sometimes even some meditation). I’ve been meeting deadlines, making presentations, giving feedback on collaborations, moving first-authored papers forward. For the first few days of the week, I was able to ride that energy all day, using time between meetings productively. Later in the week, free time has led to staring off into space.
To me this feels like a normal ebb and flow of energy and attention – it just occurs over days or weeks for me, and I’ve learned to go with it (somewhat) rather than fight it and think of the “shoulds”. At my best moments, I recognize what’s happening, walk away from the computer to meditate or take a walk outside. Or I at least switch tasks to something that’s working better for my needs.
In our household we’ve been trying to (e.g. failing, trying again) to make backup plans and practice flexibility in our thinking, as well as recognize when our strong emotional reactions indicate we’re not resilient and/or need more sleep.
For example, Sam’s been trying to plan a backpacking trip in Lassen National Park for us with Theo. We’ve taken him backpacking once before but it was when he was a year and a half or so and we had my brother along to help carry stuff and/or Theo in his pack. Now Theo is too heavy for the pack and we have no idea if we can convince him to hike 3 miles multiple days in a row, but we want to try to incorporate him into our adventures. He does love tents, camping, and the idea of fishing. The first spanner in this plan is that I completely failed to put the dates on my calendar and scheduled hard-to-reschedule things during these days. The second spanner in the plan, after we adjusted dates, is the impending heat wave plus lighting strikes, and potentially putting Theo in danger is maybe a bad start especially when the drive is 4h each way. So eventually we were able to get ourselves to the next plan, which is to try to get a local campsite for a few nights to “practice” backpacking (without moving the tent) or worst comes to worst, sleep in a tent in the living room and try out our backpacking menu (4yo palates and lightweight backpacking meals are…a challenging combo to navigate). Sam is currently dehydrating tamarind paste and lemongrass for a backpacking pad thai recipe that isn’t spicy…because marriage is better when you bring complementary skills to the table (in other words, I would never do this and benefit from the presence of someone who does).
What’s my point here? Sleep and multiple acceptable outcomes help with resilience. Progress and productivity aren’t always linear. Good teams are essential.
A few things to read
Documentary on What It’s Like to be Dying, featuring two palliative care advocates
Article The Doctors Are Not All Right about how existing systems punish physicians from admitting need or getting help, which includes the story of a UCSF resident
Interesting resource from UCSF trying to reduce the stigma of mental illness, also here
CRC training program at UCSF via SFBuild – methods for diversifying the pipeline
Here’s hoping you and yours are well.
Krista