Blood
crossposted with slight changes at LeeStranahan.com
There was a Winter Storm Warning for parts of New Mexico on Sunday, so we took the kids up into the mountains to see snow for the first time on Sunday. You’ve never seen two more excited kids.
On the way, we stopped to see our friends Brad and Andrea Carvey, Brad got to talking about living in the altitude of Albuquerque; elevation 5312 feet although I bet it’s higher up in the foothills of the Sandia where the Carveys live.
Brad was telling us that the altitude has all sorts of effects; for example you need to drink a lot more water, he said. He also said something really interesting….
“After six months, your blood totally changes. It takes that long for the old blood to run its way through your system but once it does, your blood oxygen level is totally different. When you go back down to a normal altitude, you can feel it when you breathe; it’s easier.”
There’s a lesson in there.
I’m about two and a half weeks out of a full time job and I’m realizing that my blood hasn’t changed yet.
I’ve been staying busy, but to some extent I’m still mentally not where I need to be. It’s hard to explain, but in my head it’s more like I’m working while on vacation. I was freelance for a long time so I know the difference and my mindset isn’t exactly right. I think this is probably pretty common.
It reminds me of the initial change to homeschooling that Lauren and I made. This was about 11 years ago, when we decided to pull my son Shane out of the first grade. At first, we just did what we thought we were supposed to do – ’school at home’. We had a schedule and some kind of curriculum and we sat down and went over lessons with Shane every day.
And it was miserable and we all hated it.
We barely knew a thing about unschooling but we knew what we were doing wasn’t working in any way for us or for Shane. We were trying to graft the artificial schedule of school onto our lives. Our blood hadn’t changed; we were breathing home school air with conventional education lungs.
It’s easy to leave a job. It’s harder to adjust away from that mindset but it’s really crucial to long term success. You have to start to look at the world differently – you need to stop seeing hourly wages but start seeing dollar bills floating everywhere and sometimes giant piles of them that you can get all at once.
And after a while….it gets easier to breathe.
Sandra Dodd
April 16th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I didn’t know blood changed, but I do know that people do get in the habit of breathing more deeply, to get more oxygen, especially when they live in the mountains. When I go to sea by car it doesn’t happen, but when I go by plane the first breath or two out of the plane hurt a little–I’m breathing in too much. There’s pressure. I get used to breathing shallowly after a while.