Aaron's Status

January 20, 2025

4:44 pm

Life updates as we head into the rest of the week.

We have had a pretty lovely little snow day today. It’s MLK, Jr. Day so we didn’t have to work, and $kid didn’t have school, and it actually snowed all night long, so it felt just right to sit around and play Stardew Valley.

I did get outside to clear the snow off of the cars and driveway and I’m counting that as my “strength activity” for the day, which I typically do on top of my basic PT stretching on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I’ve been playing with some new ways of staying active during the week and maybe I’ll have more on that as it comes into focus.

It’s been a fairly chaotic or tumultuous or challenging few days here for… Well, mostly for people other than me. $wife has been challenged by a severe bout of insomnia (or delayed sleep phase, or something), and $kid badly stubbed one of his toes to the point where he was limping for a couple of days and then yesterday out of nowhere threw up a few times.

It feels like we’re rounding the bend on things ever so gradually here, but it may be a rocky work week for $wife if things don’t get steadily better.

Tomorrow we will do our regular “family climb” and it is my intention to do the lead climbing “test” with my belay buddy as well. This will give us the tag that we need to freely lead climb in the gym, which is practice for doing actual sport routes outdoors in the spring.

I did go meet up with my belay buddy yesterday and we did some practice climbs and practice falls, which went basically perfectly. Almost too perfectly. The test requires that we can demonstrate leading a 5.9 and doing at least one fall/catch (one fall as climber and one catch as belayer). We did all of that and it felt great overall.

Leading a 5.9 definitely makes it feel like a 5.10, some of those bigger moves feel way bigger after you’ve been hanging for a bit while clipping, and you sometimes have to shift around more to get into and out of good clipping positions. It adds a new and exciting difficulty to all climbs!

On top of that excitement, I have a podcast recording session where we’re finally narrowing in on our title, tagline, and intro, and then later in the week I have a prospecting call with a potential coaching client. It would be great to land a client in Q1, though I’m committed to working only with folks who are a great fit for me.

Here it is January 20th already. Time just slips by sometimes, doesn’t it? It’ll be Valentine’s Day before we know it.

Me, I’m just looking forward to spring.

9:34 am

Some thoughts I have about the necessity for pain to help us to fix the things we knew all along we needed to fix. A personal and political essay.

I sometimes listen to Douglas Rushkoff’s “Team Human” podcast, which is ostensibly about how to reclaim the power of our humanity and our communities as the systems around us are absorbed by big tech and our governance structures do nothing to stop it. By means of example, Rushkoff’s latest book is called “Survival of the Richest,” which explores the bonkers ways that tech billionaires think about sheltering themselves from an approaching apocalypse that they, themselves, are accelerating.

In his latest monologue, Rushkoff used a term that jumped out to me: “our necessary traumas.”

Our necessary traumas. So many things came to mind when I heard that. The trauma that I endure as a result of my ongoing physical therapy, the trauma that we will endure as a country because we elected Donald Trump again, and the traumas that are wrought upon employees by man-child CEOs propped up by billions of dollars of organizational inertia.

Sometimes, we have to reach rock bottom before we can start climbing back out again. It seems to me that America very broadly has this problem: that we can’t seem to do the things we need to do until the problems they would solve become so large, so looming, that they cannot be ignored. There is always this smaller group of people screaming at the top of their lungs to please for the love of god just do something, but it doesn’t happen until it must happen.

•••

I’ve suffered from periodic lower back problems for many years. Decades. But in my defense, it would come and go, and often by the time I could get in to see a doctor it had resolved and the most they could offer me is “come back when it actually hurts.”

I had a “flare-up” (which is what physical therapists call this) a few years back, but by the time I did get to a physical therapist, it wasn’t happening anymore. She prescribed me a sequence of movements and stretches, which I proceeded to completely ignore because without any pain to treat it just seemed unnecessary.

Fast-forward to last year when it was almost as bad as it had ever been, and let me tell you: pain is an excellent motivator. Now I’ve been doing a physical therapy routine daily for six months and it has been steadily improving my life in a bunch of different ways.

But while the exercises do help, I’ve also had this low-grade discomfort daily for at least as long, and I think that the physical therapy routine is as much a trigger as it is a salve. Previously when I would have a flare-up, I would mainly take bed rest, use a heating pad, use an ice pack, and eventually it would clear up and I’d go back to my shitty daily habits of bad sitting posture, poor lumbar spine flexibility, poor hip flexibility, and so on.

I’d resume traditional weight-lifting workouts, and eventually I’d do something in just the wrong way and start the cycle over again. Without an investment in long-term flexibility and mobility, how could I expect that anything would truly improve?

This necessary trauma is a motivator, and a reminder.

•••

An American majority voted for Donald Trump, and he will be inaugurated on this frigid but sunny January day. Undoubtedly, Trump and his cabinet of self-involved, boot-licking, variably racist, misogynist, and likely felonious adherents will shit on a lot of good things that many of us (including his own voters) enjoy, or even need.

It is a stiff price to pay, and it is painful to watch the thoughtful systems we’ve built to protect us get eroded or disassembled before our eyes. But maybe this is the necessary trauma that will wake us up to what is happening to us, and to what consequences we ought to have expected from our misled behaviors.

I hope that the wake-up call is heard ringing loudly within the Democratic National Committee, or at least to those within it who are young enough to still be able to hear a bell at all. We’ve certainly allowed America to slip into gerontocracy, and even those of us who consider ourselves “progressives” seem blinded to the fact that old-ass Democrats are just as much elitist and self-absorbed as old-ass Republicans, even if slightly less racist and misogynist.

But now the choice between a grasping fascist and a tolerant yet milquetoast centrist feels like such a false dichotomy. The Democrats’ “at least we’re not him” campaign resoundingly failed, and if you ask me, deservedly so. Try running on a platform, try having ideals, try appealing to real voters and not to the mythical exasperated liberal whose top concern is avoiding another Trump term.

All we can hope is that this necessary trauma aches on the daily, like my lower back, and inspires us to action. Because what we need to do is not just vote in a presidential election, we need to do our daily stretches, we need to chip away and find the strength never to tire, even when we’re on vacation and we feel like we deserve a break from it.

Because the healing process doesn’t pause for vacation, it doesn’t pause for work travel, it doesn’t pause for a snow day. You do the stretches or you lose ground in your fight and you extend your recovery time. The time to act is now, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.