Level up, Part 2: Ideologues and testimonies

Two years ago, I wrote a long post about my personal evolution, delving into topics like stages of faith, spiral dynamics, and healing from spiritual trauma. Since I wrote that post, much of my mental energy has been directed toward understanding the world without the blinders of dogmatism or ideology-- in other words, "Stage 5: Conjunctive" of Fowler's stages of faith. As a refresher,

It is rare for people to reach this stage before mid-life. People here begin to realize the limits of logic and start to accept the paradoxes in life. They begin to see life as a mystery and often return to sacred stories and symbols, but this time without being stuck in a theological box. Individuals resolve conflicts from previous stages by a complex understanding of a multidimensional, interdependent truth that cannot be fully explained by any particular statement.

Now that I've come to grasp most of the core concepts undergirding progressivism and contemplative Christianity, my challenge lies in learning how to share this hard-earned perspective in a loving, humble, but winsome way-- especially with fundamentalists of all stripes. People will always need to feel heard and respected, so truly listening is one of the keys. But assuming that is accomplished, revealing the harmfulness of dogmatism in an emotionally impactful way seems to be the key. This can be fairly straightforward if one is attempting to show a racist or homophobe how their hate hurts another person-- especially if you can expose them to a homosexual or someone of a hated race in a humanizing way. But it gets more complicated when challenging more theoretical beliefs, such as the idea that intellectual assent (and just to be safe, recitation of a formulaic prayer) to a particular group of ideas is the only way to avoid an eternity of conscious torment. This modernist literal interpretation of a few Biblical passages has come to be a defining ideology for millions of fundamentalist Christians, and a challenge to this so-called "gospel" is a challenge to the very core of many people's identity. Which is why it is such an emotionally charged topic.

I think the trick is to make it emotionally charged in a different way. What if we found a way to tell a story that would melt the hearts of the most cold-blooded fundamentalists? Amazingly, I'm starting to realize I have just that. My own story of transformation-- my "testimony"-- is more powerful than any arguments I could marshal against dogmatism, because it is a humanized, first-hand account. I just need to learn how to tell it better!

Just as challenging as religious fundamentalists are political ideologues. Here again, I can draw on my personal experience as a libertarian ideologue (and, years before that, a conservative ideologue) to not simply attack loony lefties or conservative crackpots, but highlight the danger of dogmatism wherever one finds oneself on the spectrum of political beliefs. Time after time, I've seen conservative and/or libertarian ideology drive policy and behavior that can only be described as heinous-- and I've seen it on the left, too. A commitment to truth and love wherever it is found is the one sure recipe for progress, not blind faith in party or person or ideology.

I'll never have it all figured out, but after a fractious 20's, the last few years have proven to be a time of "conjunctive" healing and growth. Pete Rollins uses a phrase that sums up where I am and where I hope I'm still headed: "converted from the need to convert." Though out of convention I accept labels like "progressive" and "Christian," I try to be careful to not let those or any other labels restrict my growth in love, truth, and creativity. Because at the end of the day, that's about all we know God is and wants us to grow in.

Mid-year Update

The garden, training, kayaking, and a few trips have displaced blogging for the past few months, but now that the middle of the year has arrived, I'm making myself post an update on this year's goals. Here goes!

Spiritual:
-Reapproaching the Bible: This deserves a post in itself...but basically, I am constantly learning how to reapproach the Bible through Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations emails and podcasts such as The Liturgists and The Bible for Normal People, and am picking Reading the Bible Again for the First Time back up after a several-month hiatus. I feel that my challenge lies now in learning how to communicate gracefully and clearly in a way similar to two of my biggest influences, Richard Rohr and Science Mike.


-Meditation: Aside from a few random meditations over the last few months, I have let this slide... but plan to hop back on this horse ASAP!


-Personal retreats: Though I haven't yet carved out more than half a day here and there, I'm currently scheduling a 1.5 day retreat for the end of July, a 2.5 day retreat for September, and hopefully another shorter one around the end of the year.


-Generosity: Mindy and I have decided to add another child through Compassion International each year, are increasing our charitable giving, and have been officially approved to start fostering children (see below). In addition, I am also assuming the role of volunteer Medical Director of the local free clinic (Community Care Clinic) where I have volunteered for the last two years.


Relational:
-Mindy: Our communication and fondness for each other is continuing to improve, and I'm encouraged at how we have continued to grow closer. We've also had a couple great trips together this year, one to Wilmington and one to Colorado. Our foster care studying has also sparked some great conversations about our family and life goals. We are also working together on the gardens a lot more and a lot better than ever before, which has been both fun and productive.



-Friends / co-dates: We have started a promising friendship with another couple (the Blands), and continue to hang out with our friends the Hogans on a regular basis, in addition to a few other couples we see occasionally. It was also great to see all our residency friends last week in Colorado.


-Book club: My college friends and I just finished our third book of the year, and it's been fun having people to share my thoughts with and hear what they're thinking. So far, we've read The Road to Unfreedom, Flexible Faith, and Your Money or Your Life-- all of which have sparked some great discussions.


Physical:
-Triathlons: I crashed my bike on my first triathlon in April, which in addition to some gnarly wounds was a gut check on my desire to keep doing them. Fortunately, I had Mindy there to remind me that doing challenging things like triathlons was a core part of who I want to be into old age, and that I want to be that 80 year-old dude who is still racing (and crushing it). So after a few weeks of healing, I got back in the saddle, and ended up placing 3rd in my age group in my second triathlon last month (and was only 2 minutes out of first place). I'm currently dealing with a right rotator cuff flare-up, but otherwise training continues as outlined below:

-Gardening: The thankless stage of preharvest weeding is in full swing, which always makes me question why I garden at all. But I have a very healthy crop of collard greens, carrots, lettuce, squash, kale, and cilantro, and lots of other crops like tomatoes, peppers, and okra are starting to take off:



-Kayaking: I am halfway to my goal of six kayaking trips this year, and anticipate getting closer to ten before the year is done. I have made a couple friends who are showing me the ropes, which helps alot. Next step: learning how to roll my kayak upright from upside down.



-Mushrooms: I've started growing oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds in a more climate-controlled manner, and things are looking promising:



-Bongos: I put in a solid 2 months of practice before life got too busy for it. I'll pick it back up this fall.


-Smoking meat: This has literally been on the back burner, but I'm planning a few smokes for the fall.


Vocational:
Leadership project: My group has nearly completed an important project on the comanagement of patients in the hospital, and I've learned a lot in the process. I've also gained some important mental models as a result of the hospital's leadership program, which will be officially concluding in October.


Family Medicine Residency update: I will be representing the new Boone Family Medicine Residency program at a big national conference at the end of July, and am also leading a transition for procedures such as thoracenteses and paracenteses to be performed by hospitalists, which will be very important in training residents starting in 2020.


Political:
Climate change, environmental activism, and political orientation: As a result of my spiritual evolution, continued reading and learning, and my experience with and education on the far-flung effects of climate change, I have come to see political issues in a markedly different way than the libertarian idealism of yesteryear. Though this has been an important part of my past year, it's too big a topic to tackle here!

Free Day Time Management, or My List of Lists

Days off are precious. I'm sure you've experienced both the joy of getting a lot done in a day and the disappointment that comes after precious free time is frittered away. Though lots of issues factor into it, one of the biggest difference-makers in a day is: preparing a to-do list the night before.

I keep my to-do lists on the "Reminders" app on my iPhone, for several reasons. You always have the lists with you, you can move items between lists and up and down within a list, you can set alerts, and you can share lists. Here is my current list of to-do lists:

The top three lists are what I use 80% of the time. I used to have a "Today," "Soon," and "Sometime" system, which I had read was supposed to optimize my prioritization of tasks. But I found that the few items in the "Sometime" list would languish for years without any action, so I eventually realized it was pointless and deleted it. In its place, I expanded the "Soon" list to those which I need a computer (or smartphone) to accomplish ("Soon- computer") and those which are more physical in nature ("Soon- physical"). This innovation has made it so much easier to prioritize tasks. If I plan to be in front of the computer the next day, I'll move a lot of the "Soon- computer" tasks over to "Today," whereas if I'm going to be outside or bustling around the house, I'll shift over the more urgent and important tasks from "Soon- physical." Here's what my "Today" list looked like last night after I set it up for the morning:

Arranging the items in the order I plan to do them is a big help. I also get a nice little rush after I finish a task and swipe left, erasing the task for all eternity. After roughly adhering to my plan this morning, I've already knocked out most of the top half of the list, and it's only 11AM! 

I also occasionally look down the list of lists to my "House- spring" list, which has gradually grown over the course of the long Boone winter. I have several other lists where I can dump creative ideas, new goals, short-term purchases like cheese, and long-term items like a wetsuit. These are nice because you don't have to worry about remembering and possibly forgetting the things you will need to know months down the road.

Now it's time to offer a few caveats: 

1. Phones have the downside of being a distractor if you are in a focused block of time ("FBOT" in the get things done ["GTD"] lingo). We should place our phone in airplane mode if we really want to get something done with complete focus.
2. An excessive focus on to-do lists can result in a transactional view of relationships and a lack of presence / momentary awareness / mindfulness. Although it is crippling to not have a plan, obsessively dwelling on our personal docket will hobble our experience of joy.
3. Do not let the satisfaction of setting up a perfect to-do list interfere with the actual doing! Be aware that humans get a hit of dopamine when we imagine the completion of a task, and this can result in less drive to get off our keister and actually do the thing.

So fire up that phone, make some lists... then put it away, get busy, and say yes to life!

Gardening Update

I confess that the garden was a mess last year. I never finished fencing it, had trouble keeping it weeded, and Lula got in and ate most of the acorn squash while we were away on a trip. That being said, the soil test I sent off in the spring was reassuring, I had some good harvests, and I planted some Austrian winter peas in the fall to enrich the soil. I've also added our homemade compost (which never fully composted, but that's another issue), finished the fence, and have Mindy's assurances that she will be lending a hand now that her flower gardens are mostly planted (though a woman's flower garden is never finished, right mom and Mindy?). So things are looking up! With her help, I may actually be able to keep the crabgrass from taking over. Here's a photo of how things stand at the moment:

March 18, 2019: Weeded, fenced, with walkways partially cardboarded. Almost ready for planting!

Another major improvement: the cold frame, which is a box in which you can start seedlings in the late winter and move plants into in the fall. I've found that Boone's 6-month growing season is just a little too short to get a good harvest for many crops, and the cold frame seems to be the best solution for that issue. Row covers would get blown away within weeks, and starting seeds indoors is way too painstaking. I built my cold frame out of plywood with a plexiglass top angled to catch the most sun. It looks right at home burrowed into the south-facing slope between the driveway and the garden: 

My homemade cold frame, ideally situated on a south-facing slope, protected from the wind, and dug into the earth.

I sowed seeds in the cold frame the last day of February, and they weathered the subsequent cold snap just fine. Proof of concept! Here they are today, growing like mad (most of them at least):

Less than 3 weeks after planting, my cold frame is popping.

 My next improvement will need to be rebuilding the raised beds. The big downside of building these puppies out of wood is that you shouldn't use pressure-treated wood for growing food, and non-pressure treated wood only lasts 4 or 5 years in the elements. I'm guessing our predecessors built these boxes 4 years ago, and they are literally falling apart. I'm leaning towards building the next generation out of cinder blocks, which would be easy and last forever. Mindy had a great idea of fencing in the whole area to keep the dogs out of it, which would probably up our yield by 100%... although we would no longer have the joy of watching Lula "The Carrot Picker" do her thing.

My 4 year old raised beds are starting to fall apart... with Lula terrorizing Pepper in the background, as always.

Mindy and I also had a nice time pruning some of the fruit trees together, and are looking forward to seeing a few apples, pears, apricots, and plums come in over the next year or two. Though things grow slower here in the high country, it's worth the wait! Thanks for reading-- I've got to go water my seedlings now!

Triathlon Training Update

I've been doing some pretty serious triathlon training over the last two months. I actually overtrained early in February and ended up having to take a few days off to recover, but have been stronger than ever since. This graph is the fruit of my desire to see objectively how much harder I've been working. Though not all of the lines will keep going up as precipitously as they have recently, it is nice to see some movement in the right direction.

Runs:
One thing you'll notice is that my running gradually ramped up until last month, then drastically jumped from 16 miles to 34 miles. Though that's still not very much (less than 10 miles per week), I'm starting to build my base for the upcoming season, and feeling much better on runs than I did just six weeks ago. My longer runs are getting longer, my pace is quickening, and just last week, I started doing interval workouts, which I'll slowly intensify over the coming months. The major issue I'm encountering is calf tightness, so I've been spending a few minutes most days rolling out my calves on a dumbbell handle to keep them loose. I have also been integrating runs with either bikes, swims, or other workouts, which are called "brick" workouts, since these sessions build strength and endurance so effectively-- and since your legs feel like bricks when you start to run after biking. Here's once brick workout I plan to start working into my routine once it starts to warm up outside. The run is probably the most important component of the triathlon, and it's where I hope to make up some ground after what will no doubt be average swim and bike legs.

Bikes:
Biking in the winter in Boone is a challenge. Only one day of out 10 ends up being 1) at least 40 degrees, which is my cutoff to avoid hypothermia and frostbite, and 2) a day I'm not working or otherwise occupied. All I've been able to manage over the winter is to maintain a base level of biking fitness. If I had access to a stationary bike or a bike trainer stand, I would be putting in more miles, but that's not an investment I've made yet. I will be putting my primary focus on bicycling and brick workouts over the next few months, and will ratchet up my interval work and distances on my long rides. Long-term, I do get nervous thinking about the risk of a major crash, but I'm doing all I can to be a safe rider.

Swims:
Because the weather has been so cold over the last month, I added a few swim sessions that would have otherwise been biking sessions, and ended up setting personal records in the mile swim twice in the course of a week (36:15 then 35:45). I have settled into a pattern of alternating my custom ladder workout (200m-150m-100m-50m-100m-150m-200m-150m-100m-50m with 75 second breaks) with short, high intensity intervals of 25 to 50 meters (often using a modified "head-up" freestyle stroke which isolates my shoulders and builds shoulder strength), distance swims of 1-1.5 miles, and ancillary work like backstroke with flippers and breaststroke. I've obviously been putting in enough time in the pool to make some significant gains this year, which has been a welcome surprise! I occasionally feel a twinge in a rotator cuff, and swimming surprisingly contributes to my aforementioned calf soreness, but I haven't been dealt any major physical setbacks in the pool. I hope to keep my momentum going over the coming months, but don't anticipate increasing my swimming frequency given time and energy constraints.

Other workouts:
To evolve into a good triathlete, I am going to need stronger shoulders for the swim and stronger legs for the bike (and run). I have been focusing my efforts on exercises like pull-ups, squats, and powercleans, with the occasional dumbbell snatch or thruster workout to round things out. I limit my recovery periods, so my workouts are mostly metabolic conditioning sessions of the type popularized by Crossfit. Since my workouts tend to be less than 30 minutes, I often pair them with a run. One exercise I particularly value is the "man-maker," (which I taught my college friends on a recent get-together), which consists of one-armed dumbbell rows, a push-up, a squat clean, shoulder press, and lunges. I like to do 3 or 4 sets of 15 with a 30-pound dumbbell, which is more reps that I was able to a year or two ago... so I am getting stronger! And just as important, I do a little MovNat mobility work every morning, and a whole MovNat workout or yoga session from time to time to stay supple.

Races:
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll be free to do the Lake James or Watauga Lake triathlons this year, but I am planning to do the Huntersville Sprint on 4/28, the Smiley Sprint in Clemmons on 6/9, the Lake Logan International (a longer race) on 8/4, and finish out with the Lake Lure Sprint on 8/10. If all goes well this season, I may be looking at some half-ironman events next year... but I don't want to jinx it. For now, I'm content with entering triathlons as motivation to train harder and get stronger, although it would be nice to be a competitive triathlete and an ironman one day. Or perhaps I'll find something else to motivate me in the future. For now, the triathlon is the thing.




To those of you who couldn't view the graph above, here it is in a different format: