Life Lessons

First, a little background. I am currently having heart problems.

Trying to determine what aggravates my current heart problems has been a frustrating and ineffective mess of minor experiments and lots of measurements which has yielded almost no useful information...

Fed up with the near-complete lack of results, I decided to do a... shall we say... larger... experiment. This larger experiment got very clearly measurable results and a significant amount of pain along with those results. I now know without any doubt that large amounts of processed sugar are a very definite trigger. I still don't understand how exactly, but I don't really care either at the moment. I have since adjusted my diet to significantly reduce the amount of processed sugars I eat as a result of this, and even in the few days since this experiment and my subsequent dietary changes, I am already seeing improvements.

While this is most assuredly not my most shining moment of brilliance (my doctor said it was a moment of abject stupidity that could have killed me...), I have more progress to show from my one stupid experiment than I have had from several months of small experiments that were "safe" to try.

Is there a lesson to be learned here? Perhaps. Throughout my life, I have alternated between playing it safe and taking huge calculated risks. The results of these two alternate methods for me have been very consistent. When I play it safe, I stagnate, become ever increasingly frustrated, and if I persist in playing it safe long enough, I fall into depression. When I take the calculated risks, I get results. Not always good results, but always results I can learn something from. Learning is one of my deepest passions, and I feel the most alive, even when possibly dying, when I am learning and exploring.

--- The Dancer in the Shadows