Do the Thing

“Do the thing and you will have the power.”
– Emerson

My year’s been off to a stressful start, which I’ve largely dealt with by wallowing. With too much piled on, I was having a whole lot of trouble buckling down and getting moving on my most important projects, instead frittering away days working on less important tasks, scrolling through Twitter, and feeling sorry for myself.

This morning, however, having apparently reached peak wallow, I finally sat down and banged out a bunch of high-priority stuff on which I’d been procrastinating for weeks. And, as is seemingly always the case, none of it turned out to be so bad once I actually got started. Further, though I’m still neck-deep in disaster, as all of that work hasn’t really even begun to make a meaningful impact, I feel so much better.

I realize this is hardly profound insight; indeed, it’s simple common sense that I still somehow need to rediscover again and again. But I’m posting this as both an affirmation, and as a helpful reminder to myself:

Do the thing, and you will have the power. And you’ll feel pretty great, too.

February 22, 2017

Get Down

When it comes to health and fitness, people want simple solutions: sitting is bad, so get a standing desk instead. Problem solved.

Except that the human body is complex, so most simple solutions don’t actually work in the real world. Prolonged periods of standing in a single position often create nearly as many problems as prolonged sitting in a single position.

To understand this better, consider nutrition: kale is healthful, but a diet of just kale isn’t. Instead, to optimize your diet, you need to ‘eat a rainbow,’ trying to get a variety of different foods of every color, because different colored foods contain different vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals: lycopene in red foods, anthocyanin in purple/blue, carotenoids like betacarotene in orange/yellow, etc. You need them all, and so your diet needs to be sufficiently varied.

So, too, with movement. Thus, the answer isn’t just a standing desk, or any other tool or gadget. Instead, it’s making sure that you sit and move in the broadest number of ways that you can.

Perhaps you’re at a traditional desk. Sure, you can sit in your chair. But you can also do a stretch of work kneeling on the seat.

Or perhaps you’re at a standing (or, even better, convertible) desk. There, you can spend part of your time with one foot on the floor and the other up on a chair, and then, after a bit, you can switch feet.

And, either way, you can also do some work (say, taking a call) seated on the floor. That’s a great way to watch TV, too: planted on the carpet in front of your couch. Try sitting in different ways – cross-legged, side-saddle, legs in front of you. With any of those, you also practice getting down to and back up from the ground, a skill that’s highly associated with decreased all-causes mortality.

You can try eating a meal with your family on the floor, as a picnic on the carpet. You can read a book while laying on the ground on your stomach, or your side. You can even flout good manners in the name of health, and climb up on your desk or table.

But across all those possibilities, the underlying strategy remains: get creative, and explore as many ways to sit and stand and move as you possibly can. Each will challenge your strength, mobility, balance, and posture, and expand your body’s ability to perform in and handle the stresses of the world.

2017-02-16

Interesting NYC fact: since the 1980s, the average cost of a pizza slice has almost perfectly matched the cost of a subway ride at the time.

February 16, 2017

[Hearted]

Couldn’t have asked for a better Valentine’s Day, or a better Valentine. 😍

February 14, 2017

Taking a Chance

Last summer, I blogged about Chance the Rapper, at the release of his excellent new mixtape, Coloring Book.

Chance isn’t signed to a label, and released the mixtape – like his prior two – for free online. As a result, none of his albums were, at the time, eligible for Grammy consideration.

But, prompted by a Change.org petition that garnered more than 40,000 signatures, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences updated their rules at the end of last year, to keep up with the current realities of the digital music world. Now, unsigned artists and streaming music are both eligible. And, as a result, Chance became the first unsigned artist, and the first streaming-only artist, to win a Grammy, with three much-deserved nods for Best New Artist, Best Rap Album (for Coloring Book), and Best Rap Performance (for “No Problem”).

Though it’s plagued with Grammy-standard sound engineering issues (Chance is mic’ed low enough that he’s barely audible for large stretches), his performance last-night – a mashup of “How Great” and “All We Got,” with snippets of “No Problem” and “Blessings,” and featuring Kirk Franklin, Francis and the Lights, Tamela Mann, and a full gospel choir – makes clear that he deserved the wins:

Congrats, Chance; I’m looking forward to hearing what you do next.

February 13, 2017