At this time of year, even minor milestones seem especially relevant.
For the last six months or so when work schedules cooperate, Chris Gulker and I (and Lily too!) have been doing a twice a week, early morning, 1.5 mile walk (Tuesday and Thursday mornings) around Menlo Park – and really enjoying ourselves!
About 18 months ago, I started working out with a personal trainer twice a week. After years of never being able to find time to exercise, I simply made time — my appointment is on my calendar and the rest of my life has to “work around it”. Suddenly I had the time to exercise – and everything else adjusted and settled in around it. Delightful. As I’ve told many of my friends, making this small commitment to exercise is among the best decisions I’ve ever made!
The title of this post come from an article on Forbes.com by E.J. Mundell writing about the effects of exercise on depression citing research published five years ago by Prof. James Blumenthal at Duke University.
My personal experience mirrors the points made in the article — when you’re least in the mood for exercise is when it has the most positive impact. Feeling stressed? Take a quick walk — even better yet, make that walk around the park.
Can you believe it? We now have a “bird flu action plan” that’s going to cost the country over $7 billion. Amazing.
Last week Peggy Noonan had a great column in the Online Journal about how things aren’t feeling quite right around here any more.
I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks.
That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon.
That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”
Today’s bird flu headline just confirms it. Talk about cognitive dissonance!
Returned from Hawaii into the “real world” late Friday evening after a delicious week mostly in the sun, always in the joy.
Reality stepped in quickly and slammed a door. We lost one of our own late yesterday afternoon after a long struggle.
We miss him — but we’ll always love him and appreciate everything he did so generously for us and others along the way.
Dave Winer‘s celebrating his 50th birthday tomorrow. It’s funny in life how time gets away from you. Dave’s pondering what turning 50 means. I recently came face-to-face with what life expectancy means.
For reasons I won’t go into just now, I recently needed to do some calculations about stuff where I needed to make an assumption about my life expectancy. So, I looked it up.
I found a very nice life expectancy chart (PDF) in some US government data. Looking at the life expectancy chart for males in the US on page 9, I found my “number”: 22.5. Dave’s “number” is 29.1. [Note: This male life expectancy chart is one of those charts that should be posted above the men’s urinal as a reminder to us all!]
That 22.5 number hit me hard — that’s “just around the corner” I thought! Although they’re equivalent, age 80 seems so far away — while a bit more than 20 years does indeed feel like it’s just around the corner.
I wish Dave all the best for his remaining 29.1 years — and, in the meantime, I’m living my next 22.5 years to the fullest! After all, there’s not all that much time left – for either Dave or me!
One of the things that increasingly makes no sense in America’s health care system is the cost and difficulty of obtaining health insurance. Working Today is a New York-based nonprofit on a mission to change all that for independent workers.
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