Write the Story of Your Life

I'm currently reading a book called Defining the Wind, by Scott Huler. It's a book about Huler's desire/obsession to find out about the life of Francis Beaufort, a British scientist in the 1800s who is responsible for the Beaufort Wind Scale among many other things.

And frankly, I find Huler's prose about Beaufort's life very inspirational, and I'll be sharing some of it here. Beaufort was a man who "liked to know where he was." He spent his teenage years on sailing ships, and when docked in foreign parts, would draw maps, make measurements, and so on, both to occupy his time (no TV or radio way back then!) and also because he "liked to know where he was."

I want you to want to know where you are, every day of your life, also.

I hesitate to suggest this in one sense, because I don't want you to become so obsessed with your weight that you'll step on the scale every morning, noon and night and record it. That's going a bit overboard.

What I do want you to do, is just to record what you do every day. Write down what you eat and drink, and how you feel after you consume it. This is knowlege that you can use in the future.

I've offered this example before, I'll offer it again. This was something I learned myself, many years ago, when I worked in an office. I'd come to work feeling fine, not having had breakfast because i didn't eat breakfast. I'd have a chocolate-covered donut for breakfast, and about five to ten minutes later I'd develop a headache.

Why?

Well, it was my body trying to digest all that sugar early in the morning. The blood went from my head to my stomach to work on that sugar. Result - headache. Similarly, young kids who eat sugary cereals and then go to school where they cna't sit still don't need to be put on Ritalin, they need the sugary cereal replaced by something that isn't sugary. Peanut butter sandwiches, for example.

Your body is your temple, and you need to know everything about it. I'd even suggest taking courses on anatomy, physiology, and so on, so that you know your body both intuitively but also knowledgeably. [But beware the catch-22. Medical students often start thinking that they've got the diseases they read about in their books, psychiatry students start trying to psycho-analyze their family members, etc. Don't fall into that trap.)

Know yourself - try to understand other people.