Relative Something

I have taken a break from playing soccer for over a week and a half to give my sprained ankle time to heal. Yesterday, I noticed the ankle was feeling mostly pain-free and decided it should be ready to do a little running and kicking again.

When I sat for a short while last night, upon finishing a late dinner, after a very long and taxing day at work, I was overwhelmed with exhaustion. I could hardly keep my eyes open. So, my ankle feels ready to go, but the rest of me is too fatigued to give it the support it needs, especially in a return effort from injury. I elected to sleep the extra two hours and wait until Monday to start playing again.

It is amazing how much effort it takes to maintain the routine of staying fit. A little hitch in the program and it can be like climbing mountains to get back to my pre-injury regimen.

Meanwhile, each day that I delay beginning my cycling season, makes me feel more anxious about getting that passion re-started. Sometimes I wonder if I will remember how to ride a bike. I’m hoping it’s been more a function of the weather than my body’s readiness. A nice, calm, warm sunny day will do wonders for my motivation. It will be really helpful if that occurs on a Saturday or Sunday, too. The day-job is consuming a lot of the daylight hours, and most of my energy, lately.

I think I’ll just go back to remembering when I was a boy, and the oodles of free time I enjoyed, riding my bike for hours and hours of care-free fun. Wasn’t that a healthy routine? Too bad thinking about it doesn’t do anything to strengthen my legs and harden my butt to the pressure of that saddle.

I’m clinging to the wisdom that, once over that initial mountain, it is all smooth, pleasant sailing.

What routine? That routine!

I’ve said it before. Be careful what you wish for. All sorts of spontaneity came my way yesterday at work. Why doesn’t it ever work this well when I decide I am going to visualize being on an all expense paid luxury vacation? The hardest thing about practicing being unattached to outcomes, when it comes to work, is that outcomes are the principle objective. 

The day-job is consuming a bulk of my available resources lately. I’m always impressed by the simple and pretty much by-the-book obvious presentation of stress when it plays out in the way my mind slows down under the extra load. That response is quickly joined by a wave of fatigue that longs to be treated with sleep. If I’m payin’ just a bit of attention to the obvious, and aware enough to cut myself some slack, the stress is manageable. The fatigue is no big deal. My liver needed the sleep, anyway. I went to bed at a decent hour last night. So, bring on the day, I say!

I’m going to spend it secretly visualizing a tropical island while I’m working.

The very best moment of each day, especially when practicing being in the moment, has got to be when you lie down, stretch out, and relax to go to sleep. Since it is ever so hard for my mind to remain focused on the present moment, I lie down and enjoy the thought that I am on the front end of the whole rest of the night’s sleep. I’m thinking ahead, already.

Often times, when I know I have shorted myself sleep, I consider the nap as one of my remedies. But somewhere, I recently read about  amounts of sleep and how it related to healing the liver. The guideline was 11:00 p.m. for the time to get to sleep to allow proper time for healing the liver. I did some crude internet searching to see a variety of descriptions of how many tasks the liver works to accomplish and how much time it takes to achieve, and it makes sense to me why someone came up with the 11:00 guideline. Cyndie and I have allowed that time to become a reference point and usually use it in a wisecrack that curiously combines both our doubt over the simplicity of the claim and reverence for the likely wisdom contained in the principle.

The thinking that led to the 11 p.m. milestone is that many different body functions accomplish their growth, healing and rejuvenating recovery when we sleep and not all of it happens simultaneously; there is a sequence. There needs to be enough time in our sleep cycle to allow a few things to shut down and processes to occur before the liver can begin the serious work it is tasked with and then a chunk of what appears to be agreed as around 3 hours allowed for that to get finished. If we give ourselves enough time for sleep, as in the oft said 8 hours, our physical body has time to do what it is designed to do. Imagine this: optimal health results.

As for that nap as a remedy to shorting myself sleep, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t allow time for my liver to heal.