Control Your Pain

This Week's Summary:

Learned: Pain is never unbearable

Planning: COOP

Business idea: Dog watcher

Vet Opp: Disaster Assistance

I met: Nurses

Stoic Quote of the Week

Whenever you suffer pain, keep in mind that it’s nothing to be ashamed of and that it can’t degrade your guiding intelligence nor keep it from acting rationally and for the common good. And in most cases you should be helped by the saying of Epicurus, that pain is never unbearable or unending, so you can remember these limits and not add to them in your imagination. Remember, too, that many common annoyances are pain in disguise, such as sleepiness, fever, and loss of appetite. When they start to get you down, tell yourself you are giving in to pain.

-Marcus Aurelius

What I learned this week:

The day after surgery, there is no better reminder that pain is bearable because it is never unending. I’ve dealt with pain in various forms for a long time, from muscle soreness after a hard workout to chronic pain from years of going from 140 knots to 0 in a couple of seconds. That is one kind of pain that we all deal with in some form or fashion in our lives. There are two other kinds of pain that we deal with that are much harder to bear. There is mental pain. The anguish and anxiety of worrying about things that are out of our control. I’ve talked about this before many times because it is the most common and one of the most limiting beliefs we can have. We lose the day in expectation of the night and the night in expectation of tomorrow. When we do this, we put ourselves in a mental spiral of limiting actions. We are so worried about the people and things that are out of our control that we no longer care for the things in our control. The house is cluttered because we are so worried about the next day’s actions that we don’t focus on today’s actions. Then we see the house is cluttered, and we are bothered by that and don’t take care of it because we have to worry about tomorrow. And this spiral continues. Those are two of the pains we carry; the third is the most difficult to carry and the hardest to heal. It is the pain of your heart. A broken heart, whether it is a relationship gone bad, the loss of a loved one, or some other thing that just rips at your heart. There is no quick solution to the pain of the heart. The only solution is the belief that pain is never enduring and never more than we can handle. Because this pain feels so unbearable, it is hard to imagine that it has an endpoint. It does, believe me, it does. It may not feel like it today or tomorrow, but the endpoint exists. Life is hard and exists with pain. Pain tells us we are changing because no pain can leave without something changing: stronger muscles, more present in the moment, or a more resilient heart.

Planning thought of the week:

Two hurricanes in two weeks! Wow! What is your Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP)? Buying a generator for your house or office is a little late after the power goes out. It is too late to store your data in the cloud or a removable hard drive after the room is flooded. What do you plan to do if you or your operations manager are incapacitated? What if you have to spend the next two weeks cleaning out destroyed furniture and mud from your house? What is your business plan, then? If you operate a distributed business, it isn’t as bad. What happens to your business if you and your team are all in the same area that is hit by a storm? What about the paychecks your team expects to help them repair and recover from the storm? If you haven’t given this some thought, I hope Helene and Milton didn’t hit you and that you take this note and the recent storms as a catalyst to building your COOP.

Business idea I heard about or thought of:

I am continually amazed at the amount of money that we Americans spend on our pets. I’m talking about boarding fees for horses, as well as cats and dogs that live in our houses. Our daughter is hiring someone to watch their dogs in their house for $80 a night! As I sit here thinking about the math and the business model for that, all I can say is wow! I pay you to come to my house, watch my TV, sleep in my house, and play with my dogs for a few hours, and give you $80 a night! What the heck, and why aren’t more people doing this? That’s easier than Uber, DoorDash, and any other gig work. Speaking of gig work, if you are Fiver or Upwork, you can be doing that at the same time. What are you waiting for? There will be a time in the next five years when there won’t be as many houses with dogs because the people who leave them outside barking all the time won’t get a “replacement” dog when the barking dog passes.

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Veteran opportunity of the week:

There are a number of disaster assistance resources specifically for Veterans to help you recover from the destruction of Helene and Milton. Here is one resource by the VA, Disaster Assistance for Veterans. The Special Forces Association and Special Forces Charitable Trust have partnered for relief. Here are their instructions:

AFTER the storm has passed, we ask that you: Text the word "relief" to 205-947-2131 You will be prompted to choose either A.  If you need assistance (enter your address -able to text at that thread) B.  If you are safe (can text afterward to update your status if needed)

Someone I met this week:

I could never be a nurse, and that is why I appreciate it so much when I am taken care of by a team of nurses who love taking care of others. I can’t do what they do, so I appreciate what they do even more. I was at Evans Army Hospital yesterday for about five hours and had three different nurses, pre-op, operating, and post-op. I couldn’t have asked for a friendlier crew of people to take care of me and make sure that Ms. Suzanne was taken care of also. Our niece and nephew-in-law (?) are both nurses, and I couldn’t be more proud of them also. Just a shout-out to the nurses who take care of us grumpy old broken guys, 😁; thank you!

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