I'm in a new YoYo Relationship

Last week one of my daughters got a YoYo. It was a crummy little thing and I had a go.

I couldn't really do it but I found it interesting and almost compelling.

I realized that one of the reasons that I couldn't do it was that the YoYo I had was rubbish.

So, I went to a shop called ebay and, after a bit of wikisearching, got a yoyo that was pretty cheap but good. It was this:


And today it arrived in the post.

I went for a walk for an hour today and, after a read of the instructions, I took my YoYo and practiced.

It was quite interesting because I couldn't do it at first. I couldn't get it to "sleep" at the bottom. Couldn't really catch it or keep it and I battered my knuckles to bits - to get it to sleep you need loads of energy in the thing to engage the clutch.

The first time I got it to sleep I was like "woooot!". But I couldn't get it again for many more goes. Walking all the while I started to get the knack. The YoYo wasn't broken (as I had thought), I just lacked the technique.

But as time went by and my walk progressed I managed to get it sleeping more and more and for longer. It was exciting! For me anyways.....

So in the space of an hour I went from an incompetents novice to being able to do the initial "trick". I may never touch it again, but If I do and I can get better, I'll drop a post.

Tiredness

Continuing from my previously posted post on Stress, I can confirm that I am now so tired does to a week of crazy hours and no good sleep when I do sleep that the aforementioned effects of stress seem to have worn off.

I no longer feel my body is on the brink of im/explosion. I don't feel poisoned. I just feel very tired.

But not "those vitamins I took in 1995 kept me awake for 3 days tired" and not "I've been traveling without sleeping for 40 hours tired" a different kind.... more tired.

But not stressed!

Yippie!

This could be a momentous discovery that could save thousands of lives a year:

The more tired you are the less stress damages you.

Note that there is a slim possibility that my "lack of stress damage experience" is not due to tiredness but to the fact that the cause of the stresses seems to finally be dissipating. More study is needed - though I most certainly will not be volunteering.

Stress

In my 37 years I have had, like us all, various issues and problems in work, family, friends, travel, domesticity and so on. That is life. No, that is a lucky life.

And like us all, these problems have stressed me, sometimes a fair bit... but never really so much that I am overwhelmed by stress. In the past, I have always resorted to my mantra of "Life's too short" (The Whiteman Mantra); in the last seven years to Dharma and I guess over all to a general belief that if you are healthy in Europe you don't really have that much right to wallow in your problems.

But over the last 48 hours an issue has come up in work that's been the most catastrophic we have had in our decade. It's affected our clients in significant ways and, in terms of "work", it's looked pretty close to an apocalypse. Forgive my drama, but that's how it has seemed to myself and my Sri Lankan colleagues.


So I have been, and I guess I still am, more stressed than I have ever been before - The previous most stressful time was probably the "family famous" Guatemalan testicular cancer scare Xmas... Moving on...

But I'm not writing this for sympathy or to impart any kind of "self help" advice or anything so... emotive.

I'm writing this post because I can feel exactly how it is that stress shortens your life. Exactly.

I have this tangible sense that my body is strained. That my blood is angry and my muscles are tense. That there is some kind of toxin in my flesh that does no good.


Maybe you're a stressful person and this is how you feel often, but I'm not, and I feel that way now and it's quite blown me away.


'nuff said.