Wow. It's good to be back.
I just spent the last week in DC working on my Navy consulting job. When I'm there, I work 12-14 hour days (much like I did when I was in the Navy...), but the great part is I get to parachute out of there and come back to normalcy, or what passes for it. It's so stressful down there, it feels like you can actually touch the stress around people. I remember that feeling. Believe it or not, in some ways it's seductive. High stress, move fast, make decisions, get it done now...you must be important if you do all that, right?
Well, what I'm beginning to see is that mostly it's just stress related to too much input. If you get ten things coming at you fairly simultaneously, and you have trained yourself to deal with five things at a time (quite a trick!), then you're stressed even if you're pretty good at multi-tasking. Then you spend the hours from, say 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM catching up on the stuff you couldn't process. Get up at 0530, and go at it again. I remember this stuff.
I'm just really glad that I've shucked it for the good life in the mountains. When you think about it, time is a pretty precious commodity, and the older you get, the more you realize that carpe diem is more important than you thought. So I'm going skiing tomorrow. Six miles or so from the other side of Lake Placid to Keene on the Jackrabbit Trail. Never been there, but a group is going, so it should be a hoot.
Well, what I'm beginning to see is that mostly it's just stress related to too much input. If you get ten things coming at you fairly simultaneously, and you have trained yourself to deal with five things at a time (quite a trick!), then you're stressed even if you're pretty good at multi-tasking. Then you spend the hours from, say 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM catching up on the stuff you couldn't process. Get up at 0530, and go at it again. I remember this stuff.
I'm just really glad that I've shucked it for the good life in the mountains. When you think about it, time is a pretty precious commodity, and the older you get, the more you realize that carpe diem is more important than you thought. So I'm going skiing tomorrow. Six miles or so from the other side of Lake Placid to Keene on the Jackrabbit Trail. Never been there, but a group is going, so it should be a hoot.