The saying goes “you have to break some eggs to make an omelette”. Right now I’m feeling the cracking…

I had a car accident in 1987 where I stopped a flying Camero with my forehead. It was a little hard on my body and particularly my neck / shoulders. I’ve been dealing with that continuously since then with mixed results

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When I take care of myself, life is generally pretty good. When I fall off the horse, life gets a little uncomfortable. I get very dizzy, suffer a constant low level headache which sometimes spikes up dramatically, the pain in my neck becomes very distracting and I have very low energy – so low that I sometimes almost fall asleep while sitting at my desk. The solution seems simple; stay on the horse. However, this horse is expensive in many ways (time, money, etc.) and riding it can be difficult…

A few weeks ago I restarted my exercise program with a very good friend of mine Donna Stephenson. Donna is a master of Pilates and the fittest “older” person that I know. She works with me to very carefully strengthen and stretch the muscles in my back and neck (and legs and abs and arms and toes and …)

We worked together on my fitness program about two years ago and had great results. Unfortunately, life got complicated for both of us – a disk degenerated in her lower back (genetic) preventing her from working and I had to take some time off to sell Optio and wrap up that segment of my life. Falling off my regime and exacerbating the problems with my back by spending many, many hours in really bad airplane seats didn’t help.

Donna has fixed her back and Optio is gone. While I appreciate that I’m on the right track with restarting this program, I have to admit that today it is really getting me down. Going to the workout is fantastic. I always feel really good after I leave. But over the course of the few days in between sessions, my muscles get stiff and sometimes exaggerate the symptoms I’m working to relieve. Right now I feel like I have a knife in my left shoulder, it feels like I have a curtain partially lowered over my consciousness and my back is very stiff.

I’m heading down for some shiatsu in a few minutes to relieve the stiffness. I expect I will feel lots better after that. I just cringe at the cost of all this in both lost productivity (I’m in the middle of starting up a new business and can ill afford the lost time) and in money paid out while I don’t have an income.

What I know about me is that I have a relatively “clean” attitude towards all this. I’m happy to be alive; remembering the accident makes it very easy to appreciate even some of the simplest things in life. But sometimes (like once every few years) I take the time to really acknowledge the impact of this event on my life. That includes telling myself the truth about the pain I feel and why it is there. When I “re-acquaint” myself with this, it makes it much easier to get on with solving the problem and doing the work to make myself feel better. Somehow it “justifies” spending precious time and money on it.

Doesn’t that say something interesting about my sense of self worth…!