Month: January 2018

Like A Dog Leashed To A Cart

I really love the Stoic analogy that describes a human life, and its relationship to ‘fate’, as being like the life of a dog leashed to a cart as it trundles its way along. The idea is that the dog has a certain amount of freedom to move around, explore and control what it does but this activity occurs within the constraints of the length of the dog’s leash and the relentless movement and path taken by the cart, which the dog has no control over whatsoever. Similarly, we have a certain amount of freedom to go about our business but this is all within the context and constraints of wherever fate leads us. We can never know whether the cart will turn onto a different path, enter difficult terrain, slow down or speed up or even tumble headlong over a cliff edge.

I was thinking about this analogy a lot on a long run yesterday morning. In particular, I was thinking about what we can do to increase our freedom – to increase the scope of our control over life. By definition, within this analogy, we have no control over the cart. It is tempting to think that we might be able to influence the route it takes or the speed it travels at but the whole point is that we are not driving and nothing we do has any influence on the driver. Accepting this leaves two areas for consideration. First, there is the ease and guile with which we move over the terrain around the cart. Secondly, there is the length of the leash (or its flexibility). However, on reflection, I think we have to regard the leash as being ‘owned’ by the cart and so not under our control. Thus, leading a successful life is really all about maximising your ability to move around the terrain that is within the reach of your leash, bearing in mind that all the time you are being shifted along by the cart. We have to become more agile, more skillful, more resilient, faster and have more stamina.

I also got to thinking about how the people that we share our life with are also on their own leashes, attached to their own carts. This means that we cannot assume that their carts and our cart will stay on the same path. For a time the carts may share a road, and for that period we may be able to run around on our leash with them exploring the terrain we encounter, but clearly we cannot assume that it will always be so. We may decide to trot along together and do everything that we can to maintain our connectedness but ultimately one cart may veer off the shared path and the tug of our leashes may not allow us to stay together.

It’s also interesting to think about what it means to build something over time. Within this analogy we could only build something substantial in our life if we can engineer things so that we can spend a significant amount of time in the same space. This means that we need to be fast enough to run ahead of the cart to start the building process and can keep building for as long as the cart doesn’t catch up and pull so far ahead that we are dragged away from our construction. So to build something significant we need to be able to move quickly relative to the cart (to get ahead of it) and to move around fast enough to be able to draw together the resources that we need in the limited time available to us. I guess we could also carry whatever it is that we are building with us along the journey. In that instance I think that what we would actually be doing is building ourselves or something within us (skills, attributes) that we can deploy wherever we happen to be and with or for whoever we happen to be there with.

One way or another then, this analogy points to the need for agility (which to me combines speed, skill and guile) and stamina. I think agility comes in different flavours – physical and mental. We can hone both our agility and our stamina through exercise, developing our skill and technique and becoming more aware and knowledgeable about both ourselves and of the terrain around us. Finally, we also need resilience because it is inevitable that our cart will take us away from where we think we want to be at times and if we react negatively when this happens then we will waste time and energy on regret and despondency when we feel the leash tighten and tug on us as, inevitably, we will. Far better to accept that the leash is pulling us in some direction and focus on how to make that work than to strain painfully at the leash and be dragged to that other place anyway.

[Before writing this entry I tried to look up this dog and cart analogy so that I could give it its proper attribution but it seems as though it is something that multiple Stoic philosophers wrote about. If I had looked a bit harder and a bit deeper I might have found the original source, but I could sense my leash beginning to tighten and I had to move on!]

Movie Watch

With a daughter at university studying Film you would think that I might watch a lot of them and it’s certainly true that my movie watching has increased many-fold in recent years driven in part by her interest and recommendations. I’ve been keeping a list of the films I have watched for a few years now – here: Film list. But last year my film watching declined markedly and partly I would put this down to her absence. I had a bit of a flurry of activity in the summer when she was home but still only managed to see 12 films between January and November inclusive. That all changed in December, actually quite late on in December, when she came home from university. Just two days later I was watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi and that was followed rapidly by the excellent The Florida Project and then a host of other films over the holiday period. Things have continued in similar vain through January since she went back to university with six films bagged already including tonight’s viewing of Beauty and the Beast [not my choice – my elder daughter loves it]. I even have tickets booked for three films at the Arts Centre in February – Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Darkest Hour and The Post. It seems that this year is going to be big year of film watching for me. In fact I might even finally get to watch The Shawshank Redemption…

Listening to Music

I have a problem. I pay out money every month (to the music-streaming service Spotify) so that I can listen to (more or less) whatever music I want whenever I want because I love the idea of listening to music but when it comes to it, I almost never do so. Consequently, not only am I not doing something that I think I want to do but I am paying money (approximately £120 per year) for the pleasure of not doing it! Why? And what is the solution?

The obvious thing for me to do is to cancel my Spotify subscription and save myself some money. I could still listen to a wide range of music (CDs, CDs saved as mp3 files, online radio, free Spotify with adverts etc.) but obviously I wouldn’t be able to listen to almost anything at anytime (assuming I had downloaded tracks to my phone say). This latter point makes me resist cancelling because I feel that it reduces the chance that I will listen to music. But that is crazy: I already listen to music approximately 0% of the time so I cannot really reduce that even further. What I really mean is that if I cancel my Spotify subscription I feel that it will reduce the chance that I will somehow change my behaviour and start listening to music. This means that I am paying for the privilege of being able to dump on myself more effectively for not doing something I supposedly want to do.

All of which leaves me looking towards other resolutions which, clearly, have to involve me listening to music. It really is simple – I have to answer one question: Do I want to listen to music? And if my answer to that question is ‘yes’, and I think it is, then I have to make some decisions about when and where and how I will do this. I could listen on my way to and from work – but I already use that time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks and I don’t want to lose that. I could listen to music at home – but I think the opportunities to do this are pretty limited because i) other people are around and would probably not want to listen to the same things that I would, ii) I would probably be doing other stuff and moving around at the same time and so wouldn’t really be able to listen properly and iii) I don’t want to be hooked up to headphones all the time. I could listen to music at work in my office – but I think that maybe I would find it hard to concentrate properly if I was actively trying to listen to music at the same time. Added to this, I find I struggle a bit to decide what I want to listen. All of which means I am a bit stuck.

To try to resolve all of this (and if you are reading this you are probably really struggling to get your head around how someone can turn something so simple into something so utterly complicated) I am going to experiment a bit. I am going to try putting on Classic FM at work just to get used to the idea of having ‘noise’ going on as I work. Initially, I will probably only do this when I am not engaged in deeper work that requires high levels of focus. By choosing online radio I remove the need to decide what to listen to (apart from choosing the station of course) which helps to solve one of the associated issues.

The curious thing is that I used to listen to music all of the time, but I suppose back then all of my ‘space’ was my own and although I thought I was busy all the time probably I wasn’t and music was something that helped to fill the world around me. I’ve had Classic FM on as I have been typing this and quite enjoyed having a layer of sound there in the background although I could hardly tell you what pieces have been played (Rossini’s ‘The Silken Ladder’ Overture [?] was one and some music from Jurassic Park films was also on earlier I think, music from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ is on now). So far so good. I will try to remember to report back on my progress at some point in the not too distant future, and for now Spotify will continue to receive my money, just in case this flicker of aural inspiration catches light into a full-blown fire again.

Timetabling Mania

The academic year structure here in Plymouth is such that there are two teaching Semesters, one that runs from the start of the year in September through to the end of January (12 weeks before Christmas/New Year and 3 weeks after) and then a second one that runs from roughly the beginning of February through to May with a break over Easter. This means that currently we are towards the end of Semester One with a new set of modules due to start in Semester Two in just over a week’s time.

One of my roles as Deputy Head of School is to be the School Timetabling Coordinator. This basically means that I have to sit in between the academics planning and teaching modules and the Central Timetabling Unit (CTU) who schedule them. Every communication with the CTU is supposed to go through me which is basically a way of restricting the ability of academics to moan and grumble at the CTU and puts the onus on me to filter requests for changes to the timetable, push academics to find ‘local’ solutions and, at times, moderate the language they have used when making timetabling requests/demands…

I have only been doing this timetabling role for about a year but it is apparent that timetabling work comes to a head at a few specific times of year. There is a huge flurry of activity towards the end of February when academics have to complete ‘Module Delivery Sheets’ detailing what sessions they want/need for their modules in the following year (so at least 6 months ahead), followed immediately by a huge amount of work for me to review, check and approve all of these requests. Then there is another burst of activity in the summer when there is a two week period for checking the draft Semester One timetable followed not long afterwards by a similar period for the Semester Two timetable. At that point, say mid-September, everything is supposed to be set for the year and the assumption made is that nothing will change from then onwards. In fact, it is not simply an assumption. Rather, there is now an INSTRUCTION that nothing can be changed without various levels of approval, sometimes from pretty senior people in the university.

I mention this today because in the last couple of days I have suddenly been hit with a plethora of timetable change requests from my colleagues to process. Some of these are completely straightforward but others are really quite incredibly complex and I have a not insignificant amount of work to do to try to work out the best tactics to use to ensure that the request makes its way smoothly through the CTU. Almost all of the requested changes could have been highlighted weeks if not months ago which is the thing that makes all of this sudden activity really rather frustrating. My day today has been completely hijacked by this work. It is as if (some of) my colleagues have awoken from a trance to realise with a jolt that they need to think about what they are doing in a week’s time, despite having known about and been able to think about these things for ages and ages. In truth, of course, they are busy people, but as someone who likes to know that there are no nasty shocks around the corner I do find it hard to comprehend how anyone could work in this manner.

Today, timetabling mania has been particularly bad. I am hoping that tomorrow and, indeed, next week, will not see a repeat. I cannot really afford to lose more time to this. My timetable doesn’t permit it.

Running Into An Idea

After yesterday’s failed attempts to get out running, if they can even be called attempts that is, I absolutely nailed it today. I managed to leave work a little early after a day of five meetings and got myself straight out onto the streets. I seem to have adopted a new favourite route, and this was the one I followed today, a 7.2 mile loop around Mannamead, Peverell and into Central Park before heading home. It was one of those runs where everything feels really comfortable and just clicks. Very enjoyable.

But what made today’s run particularly enjoyable was that as well as feeling physically nourishing it served as a vehicle for some really creative thinking. I am not going to go into details here (yet) but for no particularly good reason and completely unexpectedly I found myself struck by an idea about some research that I could get involved with at work that, for once, grabbed my attention and filled me with an surprising amount of excitement. I spent pretty much the whole run thinking through the merits of the idea that involves me doing stuff that I am not especially good at and which would certainly put me out of my comfort zone but, nevertheless, just felt right. It was a slightly weird fusion of physical effort and mental creation which is, perhaps, the best experience that running can provide.

I got back into the house and, as I had decided while on the run, immediately sent an email to a colleague to make sure that I didn’t sit on the idea and talk myself out of following it up. And when I say ‘immediately’ I really do mean immediately – while my heart rate was still over 100bpm and the sweat dripped off my forehead. Sometimes, there really is no time like the present.

It’s Only Water And Air

This morning I got up at 7am as usual and immediately did my Tuesday morning exercise routine. I was expecting to hear rain lashing against the windows and wind howling around the house (as per forecast) but as I completed the routine I realised that there was no sound from outside and, in fact, the morning was remarkably still and dry. The thought immediately struck me that I should make the most of the better-than-expected weather and go out for a short run, even though my plan was to run when I got home from work. It seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, what with high wind and heavy showers forecast for later and, indeed, most of tomorrow. I got as far as starting to look out my running kit but then made the mistake of looking out of a window at the front of the house towards the south-west – the direction the weather almost always approaches us from. What I saw stopped me in my tracks. The sky was a solid dark grey colour and appeared to be fit to burst. I didn’t like the look of it at all and made an almost instant coward’s decision to ditch the idea of a run and go and have breakfast instead. This decision seemed to be a wise one as the sound of rain hitting the window began almost immediately.

But that rain really didn’t amount to much and only 5-10 minutes later the skies had lightened. I found myself instantly regretting my decision to take advantage of the unexpected weather window and, shortly afterwards, I trudged off to work in the dry, not too cold and with hardly a drop of rain falling. I was disappointed, and rapidly convinced myself that I had made a bad decision, that the weather would obviously be horrible later on AND tomorrow which would mean I probably wouldn’t run on either day which would then make it really hard for me to hit 25 miles this week (my informal target) since I would only run about 5 miles on Thursday night (hopefully), probably run nothing on Friday (I rarely run on Fridays), maybe run 14 or so miles on Saturday (because at the moment I can’t really run more) and then almost definitely run nothing on Sunday (there really is horrible weather forecast for Sunday at the moment)… you probably get the idea! It was disappointing and annoying – I had made the wrong decision just because of a little bit of rain and now my new running target was in tatters.

As it turns out, at the moment (it is now 4:20pm and I will head home from work at about 5pm) the sky, at least that part of it that I can see from my office window, is mostly clear. There is a layer of cloud on the eastern horizon but it doesn’t look threatening. And whilst it probably IS windier out there than it seems in here, it does feel like the 40+ mile per hour winds that were forecast haven’t come out to play. So, unless there is a nasty shock lurking out to the west (which I can’t see at the moment) or a rapid change in conditions, I ought to be able to get home and get out for a few miles without too much trauma.

That ‘wrong’ decision that I made and which disappointed me so much this morning might just turn out to have been a perfectly good decision after all.

On the other hand, I’ve just looked out again and the sky is now filled with heavy grey clouds and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it rains soon. Decisions, decisions. I suppose that my experience this morning really ought to have taught me that it is better, and simpler, to just go out and run and not give a damn about a bit of rain or a bit of wind. After all, it’s only water and air.

Tactics for Tiredness

I woke up this morning, Monday morning, with that feeling of ‘oh, here we go again’ and a fairly deep-set tiredness. The latter probably isn’t surprising as yesterday I ran 7.2 miles and then walked about 5.5 miles so I deserve to feel a bit tired, but I think it was more a result of having had a heavily planned and highly productive week last week which I carried on, albeit to a lesser extent, over the weekend. I oscillate between thinking that it is better to fill every scrap of time with some kind of activity and leaving plenty of space for recovery. Somehow, I am not convinced that the former makes me feel more tired or the latter more refreshed because inaction often leads to a sense of lethargy and missed opportunity and action often leads of a burst of extra energy. But I did feel tired this morning and knowing that I want to keep trying to push forwards with my heavily scheduled working days I decided that it would be sensible to do something to try to build in a bit of extra slack/rest. Out of this came my plan for this evening…

On Monday and Tuesday nights the TV series Silent Witness (forensic pathology drama) started up a new series last week. It is a series which I can watch but don’t particularly enjoy, whereas my wife and elder daughter (who is at home at the moment) do both like it – so what tends to happen is that we record it and then they try to squeeze watching it into ‘spare’ time in the day. On the other hand, there are some TV series on at the moment that I quite enjoy (e.g. Hunted) but my wife doesn’t like so much which makes it difficult for me to watch them, and there is also usually some decent football on Monday nights (although tonight it is Manchester United so perhaps decent isn’t the right word). Consequently, tonight and tomorrow night I plan to get myself to bed at 9pm when Silent Witness comes on, and watch either the football (tonight) or Hunted on catch-up (tomorrow) on my iPad, switching off at 10pm to pick up a book and read. This plan should give me a bit of extra-lazy rest time and has the added bonus of getting me to bed early so that I might actually read for a bit, as I have developed a bad habit of getting stuck downstairs (e.g. watching the news headlines at 10pm) and not making it to bed with much time left to read. The exact detail of this plan isn’t really so important. What I like about it though is that I am deliberately opting to take a positive step towards rest/relaxation rather than either watching something I don’t really want to watch or being generally inactive in an entirely passive way. I’m not sure I have really managed to capture my thoughts very well in this post – man decides to go to bed early and watch TV isn’t exactly a profound revelation – but I know what I am trying to express and, in any case, I am rather looking forward to my little bit of lazy space-time.

Postbridge and Bellever Walk

Living in Plymouth means that we are only about 30 minutes away from the excellent walking terrain provided by the wide open expanse of Dartmoor. This ought to mean that we go walking there a lot but that 30 minute barrier seems to be enough to make it quite an unusual occurrence. Yet every time I get out on the moor I think how great it is and how we should be making the effort to get ourselves out there. I think there are two keys to overcoming the psychological barrier that the short drive poses. First, it’s obviously a good idea to have good quality kit so that when you do actually go for a walk and inevitably (on Dartmoor) end up walking through a bog, your feet stay dry and comfortable. Secondly, I think it is really important to plan and have made the decision to go for a walk well in advance. We took care of the first of these last weekend when we bought new walking boots (Scarpa Terra GTX with Vibram soles, Goretex lining and simple leather design) together with some new walking trousers (I gave all my previous ones away to charity shops because, after losing over 20 pounds in weight and 2 inches off my waist in the last few years, they didn’t fit me anymore). And then earlier in the week we decided that with no rain forecast we would take ourselves out for a walk today deciding last night that it would be a 5.5 mile route from Postbridge to Bellever, towards Laughter Tor and then back through the forest.

The weather was cloudy, so we weren’t blessed with the best views but there was little wind and no rain so the conditions were pleasant enough. The route we were following got a bit confused around the mid-way point and I ended up using the map to pick out a route back from Laughter Tor following forest tracks that may not have been the way that was intended. It was all easy enough, the new boots seem to have done their job well.

Here are a few photos that I took along the way…


View back towards Postbridge

The East Dart river at Bellever, looking south

View towards Yar Tor

Rock outcrop on northern side of Laughter Tor

Moody skies (classic Dartmoor)

Psychic Scientific American

Over the years I have subscribed to Scientific American magazine on a couple of occasions, most recently since January 2016. I enjoy reading about a broad range of scientific endeavours and see it as part of my effort to keep generally up-to-date with what is going on in the world of science.

I like to treat reading Scientific American as a discipline, reading each month’s edition from cover to cover and making sure that I do not skip articles or news items just because they are not about something I am obviously interested in. The trouble with this approach is that on occasion I find myself getting behind and then I start to wonder whether it is worth the money for the subscription and whether the fact that I am behind is an indication that I am not really as interested in the content as I would like to think I am (or, as a scientist, should be). I ended up in this position in late summer last year when I somehow managed to be at least three months behind and it was in response to this that I tried to get into the habit of reading about six pages each day to catch up. Six pages is about the length of most of the more substantial articles, or a half to a third of the front part of the magazine (letters and smaller news items) or the entire back part (book reviews, pieces from the archive and a couple of one-page columns). This approach worked fairly well although I never quite got caught up.

More recently, over the Christmas/New Year break I turned scientific reading into one of my ‘dailies’ and, as a result, I swept through the December 2017 edition and, yesterday, completed the January 2018 edition. This meant that FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MONTHS I had caught up. I had read the last part of the January 2018 edition on 12th January and had no Scientific American reading in place to do (but I do have articles from two recent copies of the Royal Meteorological Society magazine, Weather, to get through).

What do you think turned up in the post today, making a big thump as it hit the hall floor? Yes, you’ve guessed it, the February 2018 edition…

My 50 (Work-)Day Exercise Streak

It’s pretty obvious from even a minimal perusal of this site that I run quite a lot and, for my age and given that it is less than 5 years ago that I properly started running, I would like to think that I am not a bad runner at all (7 marathons, 3 ultramarathons, blah, blah, blah). But despite the obvious fact that all of this running makes me pretty fit I am not, and never have been, anything like what you might call ‘strong’. My arms and upper-body are particularly weak and my core isn’t much better which is probably the reason why I sometimes get accused by my wife (or at least USED to get accused) of slouching. I’d very much like to be stronger and on a few occasions in the past two or three years I have embarked on ambitious programmes to build myself up, albeit these have always been home activities using minimal apparatus. My most recent attempt at this was my second attempt to follow a 10-week Bodyweight exercise programme by ex-US Navy SEAL Mark Lauren but although the programme looked quite feasible when written down on paper I found it too much to fit into my life and too hard. I wrote about this here: How My Arms Stopped Working.

Consequently, it is with significant pride that I am delighted to report that this morning I completed my 50th consecutive work-day set of exercises courtesy of the National Health Service (NHS) Live Well programme. I stumbled upon these exercise programmes sometime in October and started them in earnest on Monday 6th November (10 weeks ago). They are nothing like as difficult/involved as, say, the Mark Lauren programme and judging by the explanatory photos that are used to illustrate each exercise on the NHS website they are not exactly aimed at people like me. But I like them and, CRUCIALLY, I have continued with them because 1) they don’t take too long to do and 2) they are not TOO difficult. In the scheme there are six sets of so-called 10 minute exercises together with short (5-6 minute) warm-up and cool-down sections. I have been using five of the exercise sets, ignoring the one called ‘cardio’ because all of my running takes care of that aspect. I have done one of the remaining five exercise sets each work-day morning (actually non-work days including Christmas Day and New Year’s Day also when these are not weekend days) as the first thing I do when I get out of bed. In each case I do the warm-up then the exercise set and then the cool-down. I have been rotating the exercise sets so that I do the same one on any given day so it has been a case of Monday = toning, Tuesday = legs, bums and tums, Wednesday = abs, Thursday = bingo wings! [my exclamation mark] and Friday = firm butt. I have toyed with the idea of picking one of the five at random each day whilst making sure I do all five each week but for now I am sticking to the same sequence. It has to be said that the name of the programme is a bit of a mis-nomer. Some of the sets (especially toning and legs, bums and tums) take me significantly longer than 10 minutes to complete, but others (bingo wings and firm butt) only take about 5 minutes. All of the sets can basically be done in 30 minutes when the warm-up and cool-down is included. I like my sequence because the ones earlier in the week seem to me to be quite a lot harder than the Thursday and Friday ones which provides an extra little boost once mid-week has passed knowing that only the easier ones are to come.

10 weeks (or 50 exercise sets) in I can certainly detect a difference. It would not be too much of a lie to say that it is now possible to see muscles in my arms, chest and core. When I look at myself in a mirror (don’t worry, I don’t spend ages admiring myself) I can see signs of a 6-pack, although I am not sure whether anyone else would agree, it MIGHT just be optimism. And I can certainly complete more exercises, more easily and more strenuously. For example, whereas at the start I would do 8 half-press-ups during each of two circuits of the toning workout I now rattle off 15 full press-ups the first time round and usually get to 10 or so second time round before switching to half ones to conserve myself a bit for the rest of the circuit. At the start I could practically not do a stomach crunch or oblique at all – now I can reasonably comfortably do 2 sets of 15… So these exercises work and, most particularly, they work because I do them regularly. On the one hand a streak length of 50 days doesn’t seem that long but on the other hand it has spanned getting on for one third of a year so it is not too shabby and having reached this point I find myself wondering what I will be like by the time I have extended the streak to 100 days.

More generally, I was musing yesterday about the value of streaks, noting that I was (then) on 49 weekdays for exercises, and at least 11 days for 10-minutes of mindfulness meditation and reading a few pages of science content in Scientific American (or similar), and 9 days for writing entries on this blog. The value of thinking in terms of streaks like this seems invaluable and really powerful. This morning when I woke up I really struggled to get moving, but knowing that 49 was going to become 50 was a huge motivating force. And similarly, seeing my other streaks breaking through into double-figures is making me absolutely determined not to let any of them slip either.