Black Oak's Daughter

I’ve been a little busy so here are some random things that have gone through my head in the last few days.

Meip Geis died yesterday. Anyone who knows the story of who Anne Frank was knows who Mrs Geis was. She was 100.  This is from an interview that she did with a group of school children that I read on line today:

How does it feel to be a hero?
I don’t want to be considered a hero. Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.

She was a beautiful woman.

Reading that whole interview got me thinking about another holocaust survivor. I’ve studied Viktor Frankl in depth when I was an undergrad studying humanistic and existential psychology.  He had everything taken from him and lived in a concentration camp for an extended period of time as a laborer. It was in that camp that he started developing his version of existential psychology.  He witnessed all sorts of people in that situation, and noticed that even when people are stripped of everything they own and people they love, they still have a choice on how to respond to the situation.  Dr Frankl’s whole psychology was based on that. Here are a few quotes from him that still touch me:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
The last of human freedoms – the ability to chose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.
When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.

Good stuff there. I miss school, and studying these people that fundamentally get it at the most basic human level.

next topic:

I got a cheaper better version of the BodyBugg. Minime turned me on to the bodybugg when she got one for free from a friend. It’s a cool gadget that basically tracks everything about how your metabolism works. It gives good feedback about what your body is actually burning, and with that info allows you to adjust things to get the most out of an eating and exercise plan. They use them on The Biggest Loser. They are the things that the people are wearing on their upper left arms.  You plug them into the computer every few days to charge and download, and the software analyzes all the data and gives you good info to move forward with.

This one also tracks sleep. How long you are laying in bed versus how much you actually sleep. That’s medically relevant for me because of the sleep issues that I’ve had. I can take that to a sleep specialist with my history of all of the sleep drugs that I’ve tried, and hopefully get some help.

I’m fortunate that my metabolism still works. I’m interested in what the data this little thing gives me. It’s still me doing the work. The extra exercise, the eating better, is all me, but I’ve now got something that gives me feedback a lot faster and more reliably than a scale that moves up and down for many mysterious reasons that don’t have anything to do with calorie deficits.

BTW, there’s a website called Fitday.com that does the same thing without the gadget. That helped me a lot the last time I lost significant weight. The softwear for my bodybugg thing is very similar, just with a little more feedback from the gadget.

It’s bedtime.

Namaste

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