Gratefully in the zone...

“Where we love is home – home that our

feet may leave, but not our hearts.”
­– Oliver Wendell Holmes

I got home this past Friday morning, and it was really good to do so!

I actually landed in Tucson Saturday evening, six days earlier, but when I got up Friday morning this week, I knew I was home.

I used to deny getting jet lag, and I think when I was younger, I handled it pretty well. I took that position that if I didn’t give into it, it wouldn’t affect me.  I had a generously plump religious friend who used to say, if she didn’t believe in calories, she would not put on weight. Neither one of us was right.

Jet lag happens because of the difference between our internal (bio or circadian rhythm) and external clocks changes as the result of moving across time zones. These rhythms are the day-to-day way our bodies settle into the patterns of living, like eating, sleeping exercise and so forth. Like everything else, our bodies thrive on consistency – depending that things be recognizably the same, or at least similar. It takes time for our insides to come to grips with changes in the patterns mentioned above.

Over the years, I have tried every conceivable approach to managing this phenomenon.  There is lots of advice available as to how to avoid jet lag. The most common, in summary, include these suggestions:

Adjust your internal clock: a few days before travel shift eating and sleep patterns toward those of your destination time zone.

Fly overnight: This works well if you can sleep on the flight.

Curtail coffee and eat lightly before and during flights.

Stay hydrated: Try to drink 8 ounces of fluid  (water/juice) every hour you’re in the air.

Avoid or limit alcohol: It will dehydrate you and increase jet lag symptoms. The crazy thing is that it is free on the overseas, long haul flights.

Try to sleep on the flight: This works for some, not for others.

Exercise on the fight: While sitting, ankle rotations and shoulder stretches are good. When getting up for the bathroom, ten knee bends and toe raises are helpful to keep blood from pooling. The actual number you do depends on how much you care what other passengers think about aisle exercise.

Use sleeping pills wisely: Know the effects these pills have on you before you fly. The airplane is NOT the place to try out a sleeping pill for the first time.

Take Melatonin: Melatonin helps set our body’s biorhythms. Some research suggests three milligrams of fast-release melatonin before bed for several days at the destination can help.

Get outside: Sunlight does an excellent job in helping to reset your biologic clock.

Don’t go to bed too early: It is better to stay awake until the time you would usually go to sleep.

By now, I have flown nearly 2.7 million miles with a few hundred thousand miles on overseas flights. I have tried all of the above, except sleeping pills, most of which have proved unsuccessful. 

By now I have found a few things that do work for my gently aging body.  I hydrate (water and juice) as much as possible, which causes me to get up (a little exercise) frequently to proactively dehydrate (bathroom).  This happens every forty minutes or so while I’m in the air.

Ialso  protect my ears with noise canceling headphones and/or earplugs.  Take off and landings can generate 105 decibels of sound, and cruising altitudes are generally around 85 decibels. Lingering tinnitus (ringing in the ears) often occurs following long flights, and if the noise goes beyond 90 decibels for more than eight hours at a time, it can lead to ear damage. So, protecting my ears has been a longstanding habit. 

Staying up at the destination and exercising before going to bed has been helpful.

Interestingly, there is a time zone/jet lag calculator. It works like this:

- Flying west, take the number of time zones crossed and divide it by 2.5.

- Flying east, take the number of time zones crossed divided by 2

From May 15^th, through June 17^th, I crossed 50 time zones back and forth from Asia to Europe and home. I tried the calculations just to see how they matched my real experience. As it turns out, the math and timing were a beyond my reach.

So I know this…It took nearly a week for my rhythms to settle down and believe I was home, rested and in the zone.

Yep, “I got home this past Friday morning, and it was really good to do so!”

- ted

Bits and pieces...

“What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.”

Brené Brown – Academic and social worker

Sometimes it seems there is so much to say; that words arrive at the front of my mind like a large group of people trying to all get out of a crowded room through a single door – grunting, groaning, pushing and shoving with no particular direction.  On the other hand, sometimes ideas and thoughts come smoothly, as though they are winding lines of folk queued up, patiently waiting their turn to slip from brain to keyboard.

Then there is the occasion when both of these circumstances occur at once.

Traveling around…

For the past couple of decades, when traveling overseas, I've written a travelogue that by now is distributed to 150 people. It's about the little things that capture my attention, or heart, as the days and experiences accumulate.

Sometimes the eye-catchers are small paintings on the museum walls of my life, which are internally recorded before being committed to electronic paper and placed in the artificial hard drives of my computer. I try to capture them as closely to the events as possible, because I have come to understand memory is often an unfaithful mistress, creating inaccurate reflections of events. I have discovered this when getting together with old friends, fondly recalling a shared experience, only to find their remembrance is NOTHING like mine. Somehow the incident changed in the ever-shifting neuro-synapses of my mind...of course, I suspect my accounts are more accurate…maybe.

I'm on the final leg of a three-week working tour through Europe. It began in Prague, then to Poznań, Poland, on to Aberdeen, Scotland and as I write, Aalborg, Denmark.  At the end of the week, I’ll go to Sheffield, England and on the weekend, fly home from Manchester.

An artificial marker…

Today is my birthday, and here I sit on the cusp of my 69^th year trying to make sense of the privileged life I have lived. I did not pick my parents, the era into which I was born. I had no say as to the color of my skin, nor the country into which I emerged. There was no preplanning as to the capacity of a mind that to this day has remained curious about the things around me.

I had no say in the relatives going back as far as one might imagine that somehow avoided death from wars and famine and disease and murders and accidents and other fatal events, long enough to produce offspring that also happened to survive long enough for me to find myself breathing and exploring planet earth. Winning a lottery? There has never been one with such high odds for me, or anyone reading this. Yet, here we are alive; creatures of active and accumulated thought - ARE YOU KIDDING ME???

It is hard then to fully appreciate why others have found themselves arriving at a different place on earth…to a different circumstance…to poverty and fear, to oppression and complete loss of control of their lives.

How does this happen? It is, of course, a rhetorical question, one that resonates right up there with, what is the meaning of life? Why do some find themselves with access to so much, and others so little?

It’s about the thanks…

So, on this day, I feel a sense of awe and gratitude for the gift of life I have been given. I also wonder what obligation comes with this freedom…the freedom to think…to express…to listen…to disagree…to embrace…to love who I desire. Surely, in the balance of things, there must be justice.

One might think I feel guilty for the accident of my birth and circumstance. That would not be correct, but gratitude for the safety and freedom of my life cannot be entirely separated from the larger tapestry of the humanity of which I am a part.

Maybe this is the reason I find myself talking and listening to as many people as I possibly can. Maybe it is because, in spite of my inability to understand any of it, I still find a commonality of life and love, unrelated to circumstance. Maybe it's because I want to believe, and in fact do, that it is the touching of another soul that reassures me, not the circumstance. We are fellow travelers through the world together, and the artificiality of culture, gender, education, financial status, are but weak reflections of the human spirit that inhabits us all.

Yeah, it’s my 69^th birthday today, and what I know of a certainty, after all, these years, is that I know very little…of a certainty.

- ted

Zen of the unexpected...

If you do not expect the unexpected

you will find it, for it is not to be

reached by search or trial.”

- Heraclitus

“No, no, no, no!!” I shouted jumping…er, hopping…uh, moving as quickly as I could out of the shower!

Before this sounds like too much information, there is a context.

From here to there…

I was preparing for a three-week working trip to Europe. Getting ready to leave home for this length of time requires a little planning, in the “How much stuff do I need to take with me?…” department.

The destinations for this journey were, in this order: Prague, Czech Republic…Poznań, Poland…Aberdeen, Scotland…Aalborg, Denmark…Manchester, England and home.

I have one of those large synthetic plastic suitcases, which I have taken in the past for shorter trips. It’s on rollers, but when loaded, the thing can be more that fifty pounds, which is fine if there are no steps to climb. On this trip, there would be stairs, so the decision was made to take two smaller, more manageable bags.

Most European hotels I have stayed in have a zip line in the bathroom tub or shower. It is typically on the wall at the showerhead end. You pull it the length of the bathtub and connect to a little hook on the far end. These lines are ideal for hanging small hand laundry, thereby permitting reuse of ‘re-usable items.’ This meant taking fewer tee-shirts and underwear.

My electric razor carries a three-week charge, so there was no need to take its power cord.  Having recently been outfitted with hearing aids, I took extra batteries.

Once the personal items and clothes were packed, I reported to the CEO in our home, who ran through the ‘prefight checklist’ to ensure nothing was missed.  Satisfying the boss that all was in order, there was nothing left, but to tuck in for the night; get a good rest and head to the airport the next morning.

First stop Prague…

By the time I got to the hotel in Prague on Sunday, I had been up for 27 hours. It would be a three-day stay there, so it was not necessary put everything away in the drawers and closet. I unpacked my shaving kit, put out clothes for the next day and went for a walk.  Since it was mid-day when I arrived, staying up until my regular bedtime was necessary.

That evening I had dinner with friends and experienced the usual, ‘first night in a new time zone,’ fitful sleep. The next two nights were better, but I was hopeful that by the time I got to my next destination, I would have adjusted to the Eastern European ‘…Nine-time zone difference from home…' biorhythm change.

Wednesday morning it was off to the airport and flight to Poznań, Poland where I chaired and spoke at a spine conference, followed by two additional days of meetings. In the end, it would be six nights.  This meant I could completely unpack, do a little laundry (hanging things up on the bathtub line), AND because Poznań was in the same time zone as Prague, sleeping would be better.

Things began to go gently south…

Arriving at the hotel, I unpacked and put away the clothes for the upcoming days of work.  First on the agenda was to get cleaned up for an evening meeting.  When I opened the shaving kit and pulled out my razor, the battery was dead. Apparently, the suitcase had been packed so tightly, the power button got depressed…there was no charge left, and eighteen days left in the trip.

Additionally, I had put dirty clothes (i.e. tee shirts, underwear, and socks) in a plastic bag to keep them separate from the clean ones.  Filling the sink with warm water and some gentle soap product, I washed tee-shits and shorts, only to discover the shower had no zip line, requiring a different solution.

Undeterred, I took them into the shower, squatted in on the floor, rinsed and wrung them out. Now the task was to find where to hang them up…a small problem solved by taking the clothes hangers from the closet and hanging them all over the room.

Instructions for the hearing aids were to wear them as much as possible to get used to having them in my ears. After a couple of weeks, they were not the least bit noticeable.

After getting the now damp, but drying clothing hung, I pulled off my clothes and got into the shower forgetting to take the hearing aids off.  As soon as the water hit my head, I knew I was in trouble.

“No, no, no, no!!” I shouted jumping…er hopping…uh, moving as quickly as I could out of the shower!  I yelled so loud, I even startled myself.

I quickly took the hearing aids off, opened the battery compartment, and dumped the batteries out. Soaking wet, I wrapped the now empty hearing aids in a dry towel, and finished the shower, praying they had not been damaged.

After dressing, and with a little trepidation, I slipped new batteries in the hearing aids and put them on…I was delighted they still worked.

When I tucked into bed, I couldn't help but chuckle at the events of the day. Whilst you all get only small glimpses into the odd experiences that have graced my life, I live with me twenty-four/seven.

The truth is, I kinda like it...

- ted