Posts Tagged ‘fatigue’
Everything Fatigue
I can totally relate to the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine suffering metal fatigue last weekend. I’m feeling a bit of everything fatigue lately, although, I do my best to avoid raining debris all over people around me, unlike that airplane in Denver Saturday. 
I’m clinging to my thread of sanity with a weary, wavering grip. There is a climate calamity unraveling right in front of our eyes that appears to deserve a lot more change to our ways of life than the slow-responding societies around the globe are revealing any willingness to undertake. Communities are burning, flooding, freezing, suffering drought, or reaching intolerably high temperatures –sometimes experiencing an unlikely combination of the extremes– but I still climb in my gas-powered car and drive an hour to work like always.
It just feels wrong.
It also feels dangerous. Yesterday morning, I had a close encounter that used up some of my limited luck on avoiding a collision on the interstate. I commonly operate in cruise control mode with my car holding the speed and distance related to the vehicle in front of me. A business panel van passed me on the left and then slowed down entering a curve in the highway. My car maintained the cruise speed and caught right up beside the van in the turn as it slowed, at which point he decided to move into my lane.
I hit the brakes and swerved as little as possible, having no time to look to the lane to my right for clearance. My lunch tote on the front seat instantly relocated to the floor below.
It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to honk my horn to alert the other driver to my position. I suspect the assumption was that I had been passed and was no longer a concern. It wouldn’t surprise me if the other driver wasn’t even aware of having slowed at the curve.
The event provided me an unwelcome shot of adrenaline and triggered visions of a fate I flirt with two times a day, four days a week. Haunted by a belief that anything can go dangerously wrong at any time when commuting in traffic, I’m feeling the fatigue of having tolerated the risks of this trip for too many years.
I’m fatigued with the pandemic, its death toll, and everything related to coping with the ever-present threat of spreading the virus.
I’m even growing fatigued with our latest jigsaw puzzle. We picked one with way too much solid black background that is cut entirely of one primary classic puzzle piece shape: four arms, a knob on each end, two cutouts on each side. The only variation is the size and shape of each of those features.
It is very possible I will give myself permission to give up before placing every piece. That just depends on whether searching for the barely perceptible features of each completely black piece distracts me from the other angsts nibbling at me and releases the blessed endorphins when I stumble upon ones that fit.
Endorphins do wonders for fatigue.
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No Control
Life feels a little more out of control lately than the illusions of control we felt satisfied with while plodding along on our merry ways over the years prior. It’s noteworthy how the easily understood signs of mental strain gradually arrive and intensify as the duration of an invisible health threat drags on, expanding economic turmoil in its wake.
It is difficult to tell whether anything happening to us or around us is merely incidental or somehow related to the main news topic of the day in the midst of a pandemic viral event.
We have no control over how cold it is going to be outside this morning and are watching the budding leaves on our young trees with an anxious concern they won’t freeze just as they are beginning to unfold.
Last night, Cyndie and I had a good hard laugh over one comical “outburst” I experienced at the end of my day-job work week. Exhausted by a seemingly endless barrage of customer orders that are swamping our capacity (a good problem to have, no?) that daily threaten to overwhelm my attempts to control, I found myself mentally numb and entirely listless.
For almost the entire time the world has been shutting itself down to control the spread of the coronavirus, we have been seeing orders grow almost exponentially. It’s crazy-making.
When the day finally passed into the darkness of night, I rallied the energy to get my butt up off the bed to ready myself for a good night’s sleep. Dragging the shirt off my shoulders, I considered just throwing it at the closet in demonstration of my contempt for… well, just everything. But my routine prevailed.
It would merely cause me more effort later to pick up, so I grabbed the hanger as usual.
Still seeking to protest the facade of anything being usual, the thought occurred that I might not button the collar as is my habit before rehanging a shirt. I could just shove it onto the closet to hang on the rod with utter disdain.
Except, I couldn’t. That fastidious habit has become too ingrained.
I went in to brush my teeth, because skipping that grooming habit was one I tried last weekend and was quickly reminded that it definitely wasn’t worth it by morning, and described my ridiculous moment of ‘almost’ rebellion to Cyndie. We laughed heartily over the embarrassingly infantile attempt to lash out.
The sad truth of it all is how far from suffering our life is at this point. I’m feeling all angsty over a level of stress that is of no comparison to the hardships so many others are living right now. I can’t imagine their version of not having control. It’s heartbreaking.
Somehow, I hope we all muster the gumption to soldier on and take care of ourselves and others.
It really is the better option compared to giving up and throwing our shirts on the floor of the closet.
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Exhausting Effort
Yesterday was an unplanned effort that turned into an all-day haul. This is how it came about…
We were looking to double the amount of hay we have stored for the winter in our hay shed. Using just our pickup truck to move 41 bales at a time over the summer, we had accumulated under half of what we are comfortable having for the winter months.
It made most sense that we should find a trailer to haul more bales per trip, so Cyndie contacted our neighbor.
His immediate response was, “Not right now.”
He had a car loaded on the trailer and didn’t want to take it off. Maybe next week, he said. Okay, we can live with that. Then a day later, after I had spent half a day covered in spider webs and dryer lint (the hose venting to outside needed replacing) and half a day mowing and cleaning the mower deck of moldy grass clippings, I was desperately looking forward to a long soaking shower.
The second I turned on the water, Cyndie said our neighbor just arrived to drop off his trailer and wanted to show me some details of the hookup. Surprise! She told him I had just stepped in the shower and he said he would be waiting down by the trailer.
I barely got wet, then dried off and jumped into clothes so I could hustle down to greet him.
He generously provided his ball mount attachment to fit the coupler and guided me through all the safety connections. We are so very lucky to have him for a neighbor.
With trailer in hand, we suddenly had a different itinerary for our Saturday. We ended up making two trips to transfer a total of 240 bales of hay for the day. That involves stacking 120 on the trailer, strapping them down, anxiously driving to our place, unloading 120 bales, lifting 120 into place inside our shed, and then driving back to do it all again, a second time.
Keep in mind, the bales appear to get heavier with time, as our bodies fatigue. The second batch of bales are harder to lift, and I need to climb higher in the shed to stack them on top of the first load.
Since we were trying to fit our two loads into the hours our hay seller was available –basically, the hours in a day– this effort came with nary a break. As I finished stacking the first load, Cyndie hustled up to the house to put together sandwiches for a lunch we could eat in the truck at 1:00 p.m. while driving back to pick up the second load.
After a non-stop day awash in dusty, scratchy hay, I was looking forward, even more than the day before, to that long soaking shower to calm my itchy skin.
It was a soothing finish to a full day of exhausting effort.
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Relative Something 