keeping up with my sanity

By mid-December Mark had begun to wonder out loud about the efficacy of the equestrian piece of the puzzle and his logic gave me still more heartburn. I give credit to Dallas for reaching out to me at just the right time and he inspired me with talk of well heeled investors from the Rolodex that he's built from decades of transporting horses for some of that sports most glamorous participants. He also spoke to my heart with his reverence for the land, his perceptive insights about the people around us and his resourcefulness that he attributes to life on a completely self sustaining ranch. Yet, Mark and I had been together a long time and I had come to trust his business acumen. Its true enough that Mark struggled with an apparent addiction to the pain killers he took to help him through the misery of a marginally functional back, despite remarkable success in our early real estate dealings he'd been responsible for little productivity lately and I knew that he was having marital problems, he was seldom wrong about business things. The model that we were now using was Belmont Downs and at the end of the day it was true, that neither the developer nor the bank absolutely needed to have a horse farm on the property in order for our plan to organize a conservation effort to produce tax credits sufficient to reward investors to come into the transaction and pay off the existing loan. It was also true that four and a half months into trying to tease a business out of the souring economy we both saw Dallas as a formidable net worker and one was a consistent source of encouragement but not much in the way of ideas that got us any closer to making money. It was also true that in this era of virtual businesses, Dallas had other sources of income that seemed to sustain him. Mark and I didn't and we were singularly pouring ourselves into this. Yet, I needed both of these good guys in my midst to keep me psychologically composed and that neither of them Fully shared this predisposition about the other, worried me. But in true Scarlet O'Hara fashion I chose to worry about that tomorrow.

I'd read somewhere that during periods of great stress, exercise was unusually important. I suppose that beyond the ordinary good that exercise did, that of increasing heart rates, enabling weight maintenance and assuring that appetites remained normal, exercise helped in some inexplicable way to keep one sane. Since adolescence, I have skied, played tennis, ran 10Ks and 2 marathons but now I ritually walked 3 miles a day, usually at some absurd hour in the morning. Stress effects everyone differently, for me it robs me of the ability to sleep. So, I was often up at 4:30 or 5am, I might as well use that time wisely and get some exercise. What was accompanying me these days on my predawn regimen was one of my most prized possessions, my I-Pod. Like most teenagers, I collected record albums as a kid and kept up the practice until I was well into adulthood. The most cherished of these recordings, the ones not easily found or rarely heard on the nostalgia stations I had put on CDs and later transferred to my I-Pod. I like to think of it as the complete soundtrack of my life. I not only held in my memory the recollections of trying times long past and obviously endured, I had dozens of albums that bolstered me during those same difficult periods which served as an especially effective reminder of historical events and reminded me that, or how I coped with each phase. As I had begun to deconstruct this as yet another phase in my life, having my music with me was especially comforting, though during the mornings of especially difficult days I might ultimately reject even this most familiar distraction and just take my thoughts with me and I bundle up and trudge on, hopefully toward revelation. This particular year it was the expansive collection of Christmas music that kept my spirits buoyed. While I have the standards that everyone would expect, my collection includes contemplative arrangements of hymns and carols, orchestral works, both contemporary and ancient, elegantly simple works of piano, cello and organ and choral masterworks, some secular but mostly sacred. Again with my wife's full compliance we'd worked to shed the materialistic expectations from our Christmas experience this year leaving us with just family, food, OK - a good bit more wine than usual and this very special music. With all of this and good health in hand, Christmas wasn't simply saved this year, it was priceless and thankfully experienced.