#how do you guys function in the transition period without throwing up every hour???

[permanentreverie]

so i may be moving in the next few weeks 😵‍💫

[fishermariawo]

Dear Mark: More Embracing Your Wildness

Last week’s Q&A about cultivating wildness was a lot of fun, but there were some questions I didn’t get to in the original post. Today, I’m going to answer some more. From stirring stories of a father and son pursuing and living their dream after experiencing extreme tragedy to how to go barefoot more safely to the balance between creativity, progress, and Primal values to accepting the reality (and beauty) of having work to do to the value of sun exposure in winter to circadian entrainment. In short, we’re covering a ton of ground today.

Let’s go:

First I’m going to include Jonno’s comment, even though it wasn’t a question, for reasons that become obvious once you read it:

Being thought of as a weirdo can be a mark of success. The last thing my wife said to me before she died of cancer was that our then infant son and I should live a free, fit, healthy and fun life, the opposite end of the scale to what society norms dictate and very different to our previous 10 years where we worked every hour to pay for things we didn’t need with which to impress the friends we didn’t have. Watching a loved one die young inspires you to do all in your power to learn how to live an optimum life. So my son and I moved to the other side of the world so that we could maximize our sunshine hours, surf lots in warm, clean water, walk and run barefoot on the beach every morning, sleep outside in fresh air all year and grow our own organic food. Keeping our overheads to a minimum means we don’t have to earn so much money and reduces stress – our living accommodation is very basic and pollutants are minimal. No sprays, no WIFI, no power lines. We home-school so learning is continuous, for both of us! No school means maximum surf time, freethinking, free imagination. Simple but not too simple: LCHF; Intermittent fasting; HIIT; Functional strength. Yes it’s a long and winding road with plenty of pitfalls and yes it takes courage and risks to make a stand and be different but the health and fitness results for both body and mind are fantastic. And yes, everyone thinks we are weirdos!

I mostly wanted to highlight Jonno’s incredible story. There isn’t much more to say about that. Moving on after your wife dies, being present for your child, bearing the suffering and turning it into a positive force in your lives—that’s incredible. You honor not just your late wife, but everyone else as well. Thanks.

Gertch asked:

Calls to simple cleanliness to reduce impediments to creativity and activity are always good. With a large family, I could use hearing them hourly!

There are many posts I haven’t read, but something on working into more barefoot time would be good. Is barefoot good for everyone, or how does one determine if it is not ok for them? Is sock-footed of the same benefit? Is a painful adjustment period normal? etc.

Barefoot is good for most people, but not everyone. There are no absolutes here.

The longer you’ve spent wearing shoes, the longer it’ll take to acclimate your feet. Shoe-wearing (particularly thick-soled, stiff, prominent-heeled shoes) atrophies the musculature and weakens the connective tissue of the foot. It’s like placing your feet in casts—casts that you wear almost all day, every day. Most of us who try barefooting are coming off years of wearing a cast. It just isn’t smart or feasible to immediately launch into full-blown barefootedness.

I have a post from several years ago explaining how to transition to barefoot walking, running, and training.

Socks are fine. They may slightly blunt the proprioceptive feedback you receive from the soles of your feet interacting with the micro-topology of the ground but not enough to make any real difference.

David wondered:

The suggestion to increase the create:consume ratio resonated with me, in part because I think of creativity as a core element of human nature. I am curious how to fit that idea within a primal perspective. On the one hand, there is evidence for very early creative activity among humans and pre-humans, so there are reasons to say that a primal lifestyle is a creative one. On the other hand, civilization seems to be the accumulated product of human creativity, an ongoing movement away from wildness. It’s as if the lifestyle of our ancestors contained the seed of its own undoing.

I like that: “the lifestyle of our ancestors contained the seed of its own undoing.” That’s a fairly common theme with human endeavors. We get so good at things that we go overboard and end up swinging back around to realize our error of overextension. Many religious scholars, for example, propose that Christianity’s focus on truth seeking led to the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the materialist world view that ended up undermining it.

You shouldn’t be concerned though. Primal isn’t about clinging to the past. It’s about going back and sifting through the past for valuable knowledge, wisdom, and hypotheses about diet, fitness, and health—then bringing them with us into the future. And yes, we often butt up against the future as it unfolds, but we also shape it. I’m convinced the ancestral health community is partially responsible for the increased awareness of the dangers of digital addictions, the perils of excessive sitting, the rise of standup desks, and all the other stuff sweeping the high-tech world. That’s not even mentioning the effect we’ve had on the way people think about food and exercise.

Creation isn’t always about bringing tangible objects into the world. There are thousands of ways to be creative, especially given the tools at our disposal.

Besides: The future is happening. We’re here, we’re in it. There’s no escaping it. We might as well try to make the best of it. We certainly shouldn’t make it worse by disengaging and throwing in the towel. That’s no way to live.

Kelli wrote:

Thank you for mentioning a messy house. My house isn’t messy but life gets busy & we spend so much energy cleaning up.

That reminds me of the story of Sisyphus, the guy eternally relegated to pushing a huge boulder up a hill only to have it reach the top and roll down back the other side. Many people reference Sisyphus as a tragic reminder of the utter pointlessness of most human endeavors. I see it differently. I see it as motivational commentary on the undeniable.

Your job is never done. Not as a parent, a citizen, a friend, a lover, an employee, an entrepreneur, a human. There’s always something to be done. That’s why we all have that kernel of discontent simmering within, no matter what we accomplish or how much money we make.

When I’m writing a blog post, I focus entirely on that post. Nothing else exists for those hours I’m writing. When I finish, I’m relieved. But the next day, there’s the blog waiting for me all over again. Back to square one.

If I try to hold on to that relief, it vanishes. I can’t help but worry about the next project hanging over my head—the one I’m trying to ignore and deny. The trick is to not do that. The trick is to accept my responsibility, to willingly embrace it.

I can either accept my fate, the lot in life I’ve built for myself, the fact that my work is never done and there’s always something else to work on, some task to complete. That’s actually a beautiful reality, isn’t it?

Or I can build up to a crescendo of false contentment—”It’s finally over; now I can rest!”—and crash every day when I realize I have to do it all over again.

I’d choose the first option every single time. You should too.

Karen asked:

About getting sunshine in the winter…it’s plenty sunny out there but it’s also cold. (You’ve seen the new work on Vit. D and sulfonation, yes, no?) Do you uncover head and neck, or unwrap legs. Or bravely unwrap arms and legs? Is one better for exposure?

If it’s vitamin D you’re after, it’s really hard to make any appreciable amounts through sun exposure in winter time. Don’t rely on it.

But wait: There’s still a great reason to get outside in the cold sunny weather. Natural light exposure entrains your circadian rhythm—it helps tell your body that it’s daytime, so that the millions of circadian clocks we house in our cells, organs, and tissues know the time.

You know what? Expose your skin to the air anyway. It’s a good way to build cold tolerance and force your body to upregulate its own temperature regulation, which may activate brown fat and improve metabolic health.

Wendy requested:

More on resetting the circadian system, please. I’ve been trying without much luck on mine.

I’ve done a few posts on the various circadian entrainers, but perhaps I’ll do another post in the future summing up everything we’ve learned. It’s a big topic.

Thanks for the idea!

That’s it for today, everyone. Take care and be sure to add your comments or questions down below!

[watsonrodriquezie]

Dear Mark: More Embracing Your Wildness

Last week’s Q&A about cultivating wildness was a lot of fun, but there were some questions I didn’t get to in the original post. Today, I’m going to answer some more. From stirring stories of a father and son pursuing and living their dream after experiencing extreme tragedy to how to go barefoot more safely to the balance between creativity, progress, and Primal values to accepting the reality (and beauty) of having work to do to the value of sun exposure in winter to circadian entrainment. In short, we’re covering a ton of ground today.

Let’s go:

First I’m going to include Jonno’s comment, even though it wasn’t a question, for reasons that become obvious once you read it:

Being thought of as a weirdo can be a mark of success. The last thing my wife said to me before she died of cancer was that our then infant son and I should live a free, fit, healthy and fun life, the opposite end of the scale to what society norms dictate and very different to our previous 10 years where we worked every hour to pay for things we didn’t need with which to impress the friends we didn’t have. Watching a loved one die young inspires you to do all in your power to learn how to live an optimum life. So my son and I moved to the other side of the world so that we could maximize our sunshine hours, surf lots in warm, clean water, walk and run barefoot on the beach every morning, sleep outside in fresh air all year and grow our own organic food. Keeping our overheads to a minimum means we don’t have to earn so much money and reduces stress – our living accommodation is very basic and pollutants are minimal. No sprays, no WIFI, no power lines. We home-school so learning is continuous, for both of us! No school means maximum surf time, freethinking, free imagination. Simple but not too simple: LCHF; Intermittent fasting; HIIT; Functional strength. Yes it’s a long and winding road with plenty of pitfalls and yes it takes courage and risks to make a stand and be different but the health and fitness results for both body and mind are fantastic. And yes, everyone thinks we are weirdos!

I mostly wanted to highlight Jonno’s incredible story. There isn’t much more to say about that. Moving on after your wife dies, being present for your child, bearing the suffering and turning it into a positive force in your lives—that’s incredible. You honor not just your late wife, but everyone else as well. Thanks.

Gertch asked:

Calls to simple cleanliness to reduce impediments to creativity and activity are always good. With a large family, I could use hearing them hourly!

There are many posts I haven’t read, but something on working into more barefoot time would be good. Is barefoot good for everyone, or how does one determine if it is not ok for them? Is sock-footed of the same benefit? Is a painful adjustment period normal? etc.

Barefoot is good for most people, but not everyone. There are no absolutes here.

The longer you’ve spent wearing shoes, the longer it’ll take to acclimate your feet. Shoe-wearing (particularly thick-soled, stiff, prominent-heeled shoes) atrophies the musculature and weakens the connective tissue of the foot. It’s like placing your feet in casts—casts that you wear almost all day, every day. Most of us who try barefooting are coming off years of wearing a cast. It just isn’t smart or feasible to immediately launch into full-blown barefootedness.

I have a post from several years ago explaining how to transition to barefoot walking, running, and training.

Socks are fine. They may slightly blunt the proprioceptive feedback you receive from the soles of your feet interacting with the micro-topology of the ground but not enough to make any real difference.

David wondered:

The suggestion to increase the create:consume ratio resonated with me, in part because I think of creativity as a core element of human nature. I am curious how to fit that idea within a primal perspective. On the one hand, there is evidence for very early creative activity among humans and pre-humans, so there are reasons to say that a primal lifestyle is a creative one. On the other hand, civilization seems to be the accumulated product of human creativity, an ongoing movement away from wildness. It’s as if the lifestyle of our ancestors contained the seed of its own undoing.

I like that: “the lifestyle of our ancestors contained the seed of its own undoing.” That’s a fairly common theme with human endeavors. We get so good at things that we go overboard and end up swinging back around to realize our error of overextension. Many religious scholars, for example, propose that Christianity’s focus on truth seeking led to the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the materialist world view that ended up undermining it.

You shouldn’t be concerned though. Primal isn’t about clinging to the past. It’s about going back and sifting through the past for valuable knowledge, wisdom, and hypotheses about diet, fitness, and health—then bringing them with us into the future. And yes, we often butt up against the future as it unfolds, but we also shape it. I’m convinced the ancestral health community is partially responsible for the increased awareness of the dangers of digital addictions, the perils of excessive sitting, the rise of standup desks, and all the other stuff sweeping the high-tech world. That’s not even mentioning the effect we’ve had on the way people think about food and exercise.

Creation isn’t always about bringing tangible objects into the world. There are thousands of ways to be creative, especially given the tools at our disposal.

Besides: The future is happening. We’re here, we’re in it. There’s no escaping it. We might as well try to make the best of it. We certainly shouldn’t make it worse by disengaging and throwing in the towel. That’s no way to live.

Kelli wrote:

Thank you for mentioning a messy house. My house isn’t messy but life gets busy & we spend so much energy cleaning up.

That reminds me of the story of Sisyphus, the guy eternally relegated to pushing a huge boulder up a hill only to have it reach the top and roll down back the other side. Many people reference Sisyphus as a tragic reminder of the utter pointlessness of most human endeavors. I see it differently. I see it as motivational commentary on the undeniable.

Your job is never done. Not as a parent, a citizen, a friend, a lover, an employee, an entrepreneur, a human. There’s always something to be done. That’s why we all have that kernel of discontent simmering within, no matter what we accomplish or how much money we make.

When I’m writing a blog post, I focus entirely on that post. Nothing else exists for those hours I’m writing. When I finish, I’m relieved. But the next day, there’s the blog waiting for me all over again. Back to square one.

If I try to hold on to that relief, it vanishes. I can’t help but worry about the next project hanging over my head—the one I’m trying to ignore and deny. The trick is to not do that. The trick is to accept my responsibility, to willingly embrace it.

I can either accept my fate, the lot in life I’ve built for myself, the fact that my work is never done and there’s always something else to work on, some task to complete. That’s actually a beautiful reality, isn’t it?

Or I can build up to a crescendo of false contentment—”It’s finally over; now I can rest!”—and crash every day when I realize I have to do it all over again.

I’d choose the first option every single time. You should too.

Karen asked:

About getting sunshine in the winter…it’s plenty sunny out there but it’s also cold. (You’ve seen the new work on Vit. D and sulfonation, yes, no?) Do you uncover head and neck, or unwrap legs. Or bravely unwrap arms and legs? Is one better for exposure?

If it’s vitamin D you’re after, it’s really hard to make any appreciable amounts through sun exposure in winter time. Don’t rely on it.

But wait: There’s still a great reason to get outside in the cold sunny weather. Natural light exposure entrains your circadian rhythm—it helps tell your body that it’s daytime, so that the millions of circadian clocks we house in our cells, organs, and tissues know the time.

You know what? Expose your skin to the air anyway. It’s a good way to build cold tolerance and force your body to upregulate its own temperature regulation, which may activate brown fat and improve metabolic health.

Wendy requested:

More on resetting the circadian system, please. I’ve been trying without much luck on mine.

I’ve done a few posts on the various circadian entrainers, but perhaps I’ll do another post in the future summing up everything we’ve learned. It’s a big topic.

Thanks for the idea!

That’s it for today, everyone. Take care and be sure to add your comments or questions down below!

[silhouetteofadon]

A Raw Day

TL:DR version: Chris is having a raw and bad day and is just venting.  Probably being a little bitch. At the moment I'm having a raw day it seems.  I'm kind of feeling lost, swimming this sea of doubt, of frustration and anger.   I have my anchor points in life though; Mina, her girls and my desire to keep learning how to art.  The reality is though I just feel... tired.  The last few years have been... frustrating.  To kick off this tale of attempting to dump my woes into something several years ago I dated a gal named Stephanie.  When I started dating her I had just cleared my debts that my mother had wracked up in my name, I had found myself a stable and consistent living arrangement and over the last year I had lost 70lbs.  I was in a good place, starting forward. I at that point decided I wanted to date again, reached out and bumped my world into Steph.  We dated and due to her lease coming up, we agreed to move in together relatively early in our relationship. We were happy so we saw no problem with it. And co-living honestly was never a problem for us.  I suppose in the end, it was what she wanted from the relationship vs mine.  Steph is not a bad person, I'd like to state, but she is a self serving one when it comes down to it.   Enough that even after meeting her best friend in CT that the last time we saw her her friend looked Steph in the eye and told "Take care of this one."  Steph was confused of course but her friend reassured her the same thing as if there was a history somewhere.  In our relationship I wanted a companion to experience life with and Steph... Steph well wanted a bit of that 50's house wife sort of experience.   She shifted a lot of the financials towards me even though she made significantly more.  I had to cover the dinners, dates, she refused to pay extra for her friend Anna that was living with us unemployed and without state benefits.   In the end, it cost me a lot.  When things ended later one I was $7000 in the hole before realizing she wanted to just walk away within two months of being married because she wanted to have another man's children before mine.   To say the last the relationship left me with a bit of a fucked up head the last few years since. There is far more the story though, self discovery of how I function in relationships, what kind of people I need on the other side of the fence, lusts, lack of lust and just in general who I don't want in my life anymore.   To give an abbreviated ending to this, Steph and my current girlfriend more or less spouse swapped Mina's husband and I.  Mina and I are happy, working as hard as we can to make things work.  Originally, while displeased from the turn of events, Mina and I took a breath to play out the results of the exchange civilly. After all, kids were involved. Mina and Layfe young ones in their life and we wanted what was best for them.  We had drawn up a six month plan before anyone moved to give everyone financial security and a transition period.  One month in Steph of course couldn't handle that I was no longer treating her like a princess so she decided to jump ship early, giving me no time to curb down my debts I had gained from our relationship.  It didn't feel right to ask her for money back for dating her.  To top that off, a week before Mina was to come down with the girls, Layfe filed an injunction with the courts so that Zizah (the youngest and their biological child) couldn't leave the state. There was no money or time to fight anything so Zii had to be left with him.  Layfe also threw Mina a bit under the bus though he says looking back at things at the time, he didn't mean to and as he is genuinely a great guy, I believe he didn't mean for things to come off as harsh as they did.  He like Steph aren't bad people, simply self serving when it comes down to it.  His statements to the court heavily laid into Mina's use of cannibis (which she uses to tackle her pains, PTSD, Depression and anxiety.)   It helps her function well as a person and you can often see the times she is on and off of it. Sadly at the time it wasn't legal so it worked in detriment to her case.   Also Mina had been a stay at home mom for years so she also had minimal job experience to show reliability.     Moving on from that chapter though, Mina and her daughter Uri move down.  I throw myself into work for OT as we have no room mates lined up to pad out the missing money.   Our room mates we had planned were quite a ways off at the end of that six-seven month drop.   Mina got on state review, where they immediately saw her case, did her psychology and said she definitely should not be working right now.  The loss of her child in her life flared up her depression, trapping her in a cycle of grief that only seemed to restart every time she got to see her kid with no real closure for it.  It was hard and so painful to watch it happen to her.   But I did what I could. I worked later shifts for extra money, worked OT as it came up and we calculated our money the best we could.  We managed fine.  Our planned room mates kept pushing their plan out and out and out. The last two years have been this extended financial struggle and me sorting out my own developed anxiety and depression over the years.  But to be honest? Mostly the persistent feeling of being so damn tired.  Every time I manage to get ahead something would swing back in and wreck my lego tower.  Like some divine joke I just don't understand yet.  We finally did get a stable room mate however, Mina's friend Dan.  He was great, helped us get on our feet and was a good friend that we needed in our life.  But, his stay was temporary and he moved out to his own place. Of course, then game the false light.  Within the last few months Kaia (Mina's friend) and her girlfriend Lexi finally make it up here.  They drove from Florida, all the way up to Washington.  They arrived and honestly everything was great.  Lexi was the employed of the two and Kaia lived off SSI.  Money wise things were fine and everyone got along snazzy for about 30 days.   Then shit dropped again.  Within only a few days before rent being due, Kaia threw down the childish meltdown of a century.  The details are honestly embarrassing and are centered around turning a light off in a room where we were trying to put a 12 year old to sleep in.  In the end, within 24 hours of her freaking out, she burned the bridge and moved out, dragging Lexi along who clearly didn't agree with this course of action or reason but wanted to support her other half.  So they moved out, shorting us $1100 with no way to find it.   Thankfully my dad was able to save us, paying it out of his own pocket.  Something I of course need to pay back ahead of my other debts I've been unable to do anything about. Not wishing to be stuck again, we immediately set into finding a new room mate; we found Josh.  He came, looked at the room, decided it was good and agreed to $600 for it.  About $150 less than we desired but we can make that work.   After he agreed to the room, Josh went radio silent for about two weeks on us after we brought up discussion of a deposit. After working 141 hours in two weeks, I finally found some decent hours this week to reach out and talk to him again as he hadn't responded to the subject.  After a few days of calling, he says he still wants the room but doesn't want to do a deposit.  Honestly I was ok with putting that aside.  He also then wanted to pay $500 for the room instead of $600.  I took a night to think about it, discussed with some folks and in the end, definitely going to stick with $600.  Of course now I'm stuck doing the wait for his response. But I feel... made.  Aching.  I just stopped working my OT as a break.  I've been working 100-140 hour work pay checks the last four months of this year.  I'm so tired.   I'm so burned out.   I can't manage the brain or willpower to do routine practice sketches and Mina can't help our financial situation more than the state will allow her.  She is almost done with her GED program and she just got a job at the college in the day care but technically it is still somewhat volunteer work and the state has been vague on if it will increase her stipend.   But I think I'm off point for what I was getting to... I'm just... I'm tired of never feeling like I'm getting ahead or even on track.   This 141 hour check for example:  is pretty much gone.  Right out the door. Just... gone. If Josh isn't moving in and I don't find a quick replacement, bills and rent will eat everything.  I can't afford to take the girl's to the water park so this season pass just sits and rots besides the one visit we managed so far.  I can't buy Uri a bike yet like I told her  I would try to when she asked about it.  I can't help replace Mina's cannabis that the state won't provide (hilariously because she doesn't smoke enough to warrant a prescription.  I can't manage the energy after all the OT to actively take the girls out to play or do a board game or sometimes even the will to just sit on the couch and watch MLP with them.   I don't really get the time or chance to process any of this.   I just want to take care of them and be happy and I just don't understand why it is so hard sometimes.  I just want to take care of folks in my life and occasionally commission a drawing.  You know, some happy stuff.   If you read all of this I am sorry.  I don't know why I'm doing it but today I just... I just wanted to put something down. Something in writing or bitch and moan. I don't know what it is.