Manage My Practice

February 1, 2010

We don’t have a television.  Sometimes I feel slightly embarrassed when I tell people this and sometimes I feel slightly superior.  We made the decision not to have a tv when we moved back to NC from Seattle.  We had two televisions in our home then, one in the living room, and one in the bedroom on top of an electric fireplace.  What a guilty pleasure it was to sneak down to the bedroom, crawl under the comforter and use the remote to turn on the fireplace and the tv, watching something like Lifetime for Women.  Yep, I admit I watched that sometimes, but I always drew the line at anything with Valerie Bertinelli in it.

We were leaving Seattle and both televisions were old and thick and bulky and we just didn’t want to move them so we sold them in the mondo yard sale we had.  We had previous experience with not having a tv when we were first married and we remember that time in the hazy idealistic light that the past sometimes takes on.  So we decided not to have a television.

We do, however, have visual entertainment. We have a projector that we can watch movies with using my husband’s laptop, and projecting it on the living room wall.  We once ran the tv through the projector for about a year and people who came to our house were dumbfounded by our 90″ wall of moving pictures.  We have our own movie favorites (The Big Lebowski, Apocolypse Now, the complete Alfred Hitchcock) and we have Netflix.  But everyone thinks it’s weird that we don’t have a tv.

I wonder if I would work as much on my blog if we had a tv, although I used to work on my blog while I watched tv. I do know that I seem to have more time without a television.  I listen to more music and have more silence in my life.  I find it easier to go to bed at a “decent” hour, so I get more sleep.  But I don’t get to join in on the office talk about the tv shows.

Every once in awhile I come home from work and yearn to plop on the couch and have a heavy dose of Project Runway or Top Chef, but for the most part, I’m pretty happy without a television.  My husband and son however, have been fondling the Best Buy circular and talking about the virtues of HDTV vs. regular TV.  I may be neither embarrassed nor superior in the very near future.

January 3, 2010

I started this page to journal our trip across the US to return to the East coast last year.  It’s just been sitting here since then and I’ve decided to use it to write about things generally unrelated to healthcare, although I don’t really think I can untangle my professional life from my personal one, and I’m not sure I want to.

Over this holiday I’ve been thinking about Relaxing.  I’m not sure I know what it means. Not to others or to me.  I asked Bob what relaxing means to him and he said “Sitting on the back porch reading a book, sipping coffee or a beer, and looking up now and then to enjoy the trees and the water.”

When you look up “relaxing” on Wikipedia, it redirects you to “leisure”, not at all the same thing in my mind.  Many times I have leisure time, but cannot relax.

Psychology professor of the early 1970’s JohnNeulinger put forth one of the criteria for leisure as “a state of mind.” I agree that relaxing is a state of mind, but it is only now that I agree with that after having discarded my previous ideas of what relaxing is for me:

1. Being on a cruise. Granted I picked the wrong cruise, but I don’t remember being relaxed at any point during the 3 nights/4 days to Cabo and back.
2. Having 2 full weeks off. One of the worst times in my life.  By the time I returned to work I was a nervous wreck.
3. Attending a professional conference.  If anything, I relax less, and my mind churns more.
4. Being able to sleep in as long as I like on the weekends. I find that sometimes I sleep too much and don’t feel well the rest of the day, or get my sleep schedule all messed up, or resent the fact that I’ve lost time. The older I get the more I hate the waste of sleep, and conversely, the tireder I am.
5. Living near the beach. The beach has the power to right my world.  It brings me back to being a human, being insignificant, and realizing that my worries today are but a drop of water in a very large bucket. Living near the beach vs. visiting the beach are not the same thing for me.  When I lived near the beach I could not achieve that same sense of my world righting itself.

So now you think I’m a bundle of nerves, probably a workaholic, and I don’t know how to relax.  Yep. That would be me.

What are the times I am most relaxed?

1. Reading a mystery.  I love to lose myself in a good mystery.  I especially like the British mystery writers P.D. James, Elizabeth George and Caroline Graham.  Agatha Cristy and Arthur Conan Doyle are superb too. I’ve read almost everything they’ve written and have Bob on the hunt for more.
2. Having a massage with a massage therapist who knows where my tensions dwell.
3. The silence in Quaker meeting. A practice of being quiet together which is amazingly comforting.  It takes some time to learn, as in any meditation, to achieve a sense of complete relaxation.

Therefore, I find relaxation not in a place, or a time, but in silence and letting go and being able to turn my inner voice completely off.  It is a state of mind, but more particularly a state of being out of my mind. Sounds right, somehow.