Out of balance

Mondays are tough, especially after being away for the weekend. I am feeling out of balance, physically and emotionally. It was tough to come to lab even though on most days I don't dread work, this morning I was not looking forward to it at all. In the first half of the day I didn't get anything done, not surprisingly, and even now, I'd rather be writing than looking at my results of doing an experiment. I was in Boston for the weekend, and even though it was a relaxing trip, I felt exhausted afterwards, probably because of the bus-ride, walking around a lot and the left-over from the past few weeks I haven't been able to sleep off. I also haven't been working out at all. Not being able to run, I lost much of my motivation and energy and I have maybe been going to yoga once a week, biking on the weekend or maybe go swimming, but not very regularly. After noticing the tendonitis last week, I was very discouraged from any kind of exercise, as I had no idea what really caused it. Fortunately it's much better now, and I can try a little bit of running on the treadmill this week. Without any expectations though...

Before leaving for Boston on Friday I went to see an acupuncturist. At first I wasn't sure if I liked him very much, but by the end of the hour and a half I spent there he had really grown on me. He was very to-the-point, New Yorker no-bullshit kind of guy, and while that can be a little intimidating at first, I'd like someone who sticks needles in me to be that way. I asked him about the science behind acupuncture, and he gave me the dumbed-down 10 minute version. He talked about "chi" or energy force that runs through the whole body as the electrical wiring and the different organs or body parts as light bulbs. I liked the metaphor he used to describe the difference between Western and Eastern medicines. He said that in Western medicine, when a light bulb goes out, we change the bulb and hopefully it'll work for a while. In Eastern medicine, we try to find the problem with the wiring and fix the circuits, and hope that the light will go on again and keep working for a long time. I think that this day in age with the advances in Western medicine, we can fix many things but we should pay more attention to our body as a whole and try to really integrate both philosophies into every-day treatment of all kinds of problems. I liked that the acupuncturist didn't bash Western medicine but agreed that to fix some problems, you need to see doctors and take medication and so on, but according to Eastern philosophy, many ailments are caused by an imbalance in our bodies. I have been trying to read up on this, and it seems like the basic principle goes back to the idea of Ying and Yang and how these opposing life forces have to be in balance in order for our bodies and minds to function correctly. If for some reason there is an imbalance, we get sick. And acupuncture is supposed to help in bringing back balance by focusing on specific points in the body where energies concentrate near the skin.



When one thing goes out of balance, it kind of drags everything with it. It's like the expression "bad things come in threes". When things are going well in my life, I am getting good results in lab, have time to work out a lot, run, spend time with friends, then all things start to fall into place. The opposite is also true: things in lab have been going badly, I can't run, I am unmotivated, and then all of a sudden, everything seems a little darker and the negative thoughts feed into each other. It's a cycle that's difficult to stop, but I am getting better it. Better at finding the balance, which needs to happen in this moment. It's often easy to think that things are temporarily going badly and they will be better some time in the future. It's the present, this moment though that we live in and have to experience. So we have to make every moment count and not always look into the future as a sort of crutch to lean on. Humans are cursed by the ability to imagine the future. We not only know that everything is going to end once, we can imagine better things and dream about worlds that don't exist. This means that we can live in a completely imagined world and never deal with the real one that is usually more difficult than we'd like. My task for today and every day to come, is to be aware of every moment and to make them count. I have to go to yoga tonight...