May be spared the knife?
The consultant reckons I have an internal oblique tear but the damage is in the muscle belly or MT junction, so I may yet be spared surgery. Good news, although I’m not 100% convinced he’s right. For now at least it’s an all clear to try some winter climbing and see how I get on.
Meanwhile I still feel good in training, although cabin fever is reaching breaking point. It’s amazing how daily exposure to the outdoors and empty spaces becomes so hardwired it drives you quite nuts in even the most temporary withdrawal from it. I sometimes say in lectures that I love training so much that if I was somehow restricted to only climbing on my board I wouldn’t mind too much. Hmmm, maybe that’s not true after all! It’s nice to know that a balance of both keep mind and body healthy.
That said, aside from the finger strength gains, the time at home has been great to get everything in order for the coming year. It’s so true that if you don’t take time to sort stuff out and get organised, it tends to get in the way later on when you need to be in full focus.
I'm an obsessive type and cant stand to leave things unfinished unless it's unavoidable (hence I have a respectable ticklist in redpointing). But that's only half of it. I remember listening to the Forum's 60 second ideas to improve the world while driving down Glenfinnan and one related very strongly with me. It was to abstain from multitasking! I do my fair share of multitasking and occasionally it's totally the thing to do, such as when working with slow computers or mundane tasks. But most of the time, it actually slows everything down rather than adding efficiency. And usually, you end up with crap work into the bargain.
People often roll their eyes, or criticise my all or nothing, drop everything else approach. But I must say that every accomplishment I've made in my life has come via this approach. I'm addicted to it and have yet to find a better substitute for focus.
I remember that call to abandon that goal of multitasking. In my mind it means being able to spend a lot of time concentrating and excelling at one thing in one extended period of time.
ReplyDeleteMany of us have not afforded ourselves that luxury (that's not a complaint, thought I recognise that that formulation of words is often associated with a complaining mode of language. )
I'm a moderate programmer, a moderate poet, a moderate climber. The career I've followed had not been conductive to focussing on one thing, but in the work I do I strive to make the space for others to excel. In tasks that involve many people (anything that most modern companies do) there is a lot of waste of time. I have the opportunity to absorb much of that waste to leave my teams the space to accomplish great things.
I take a lot of inspiration from this blog, and it has made me a better climber. I've thought often about carving out a more focussed and dedicated approach to many things not least climbing, but in the end I just don't do that.
I've found, in spite of this, I've been able to improve year on year, bit by bit, but I've had to recalibrate my expectations. To keep making those improvements I've needed to focus not on the outcomes as much as on the process.