The Standing Desk [β] - Day 40

June 3, 2012

The inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent liked the number forty. There are a couple of dozen references to 40, measuring days or years, in those ancient teaching scripts and histories that we’ve collected into the Judeo-Christian Bible. Forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain; forty years old, forty sons, forty cubits, forty baths, forty days’ fast.

Other than the numeric connotation (and the fact that everything is related to everything else), there was nothing biblical about the “Alpha” trial period for my standing desk. There was a flash of insight in the form of a worrisome news article, and a half-hour’s work shifting my office from the window that overlooked the garden and the apple tree at its center; the rest was riding out the alpha wave, waiting for a sign that would tell me to: a) land my standing desk in a more permanent place, b) take it apart plank by plank, or c) keep on waiting.

Significant or not, it’s been forty days. Here’s where I’ve traveled:

My feet hurt less Partly because I have taken to wearing my running shoes – those scarcely-worn lace-ups that were hidden under the bench in the mudroom, gathering dust and spiders’ nests, while I spent my energies on gardens and hammocks and compost heaps (which apparently attract bears) and lawn-mowing and lounging.

I think they hurt less, too, because I don’t wear those running shoes every day, or all day: instead, leveraging the privileges of a home office, I wear sandals, or go barefoot. I imagined this flexibility of how I am physically with my work would make a friendlier environment, and I am happy to report I was right. In well-built experiments, all possibilities are available and all answers are useful, including “this is not working”, which is not at all the same as failure. In this particular experiment the answer to date is “I’m liking this” and “I feel better”, which is both useful and welcome.

I am in constant motion Which, without forcing the motion to be there, is exactly the result for which I was hoping. Instead of two hours or three hours mentally pinned to the ideas playing out in LCD, the natural breaks for mental and physical refreshment occur simply by stepping to the right or the left. Somehow, the trivial act of getting up out of a chair wasn’t nearly so trivial as it appeared and, with my forty days’ retrospection, I find that I have gained a liberty I didn’t realized had been lost.

Aside from helping my feet and legs stay afloat for the entire day, this mobility has noticeably improved my “core strength”, even when I am body-oblivious in concentration. While in a desk chair (however ergonomically sound it was), I needed to make a conscious effort to change or correct my posture, and only with real difficulty could I find a sitting pattern that exercised my abdominal muscles. Mostly I felt a slump, not unlike a slow-motion landslide that, over the course to the next few years, would have transferred a certain undesirable amount of body mass from the upper cliffs of my solar plexus, and deposited them in a rather undignified and self-conscious heap just below my belly button.

Forty days is no test of pot-belly deterrence, of course. However, after years of physical practice, I can feel the difference in muscle tone already, and that is one strong argument not to return to sedentarism.

The upper body wins, too The chronic computer-related shoulder and neck twinges have simply dissolved. Now that is a remarkable result I had not anticipated, as I had assumed my right-handedness and use of mouse and keyboard were the cause of cricks and knots. Apparently, not so! I stand straighter. It is difficult to slouch over on the chair’s right arm-rest while I mouse around the screen… I mean, it is not possible, since there is not rest to rest on. I guess it was simply posture, and standing up like the biped I am, as opposed to sitting down like the mono-rump I fortunately am no more, has engaged muscle and aligned skeleton in a more natural way.

The additional mobility has also made my 3-minute breaks easier. Once an hour, a little alarm goes off on my computer – use technology against itself, I say! – and it freezes my screen for 180 seconds. In that time, I bend over and pick up two 15-pound free weights. Without the structure of the chair to do… whatever it does to me… I find it easier to listen to the body, and move with those weights in a way that best ameliorates fatigue or stasis. In just a few seconds, muscles are toned, mind is wakened, blood flows. I had already been doing this in my chair existence, but as I look back, quite often I would lift the weights from the comfort of my chair. This feels much better.

The past few days, I haven’t felt particularly light. It is probably the effects of Post-Adventure Sadness Syndrome (PASS), where a return to one’s lovely home, from a weekend of nonstop joyful community, doesn’t sit nearly as right as it ought to; where the physical and emotional memories of conversation and shared meals and intimate or exuberant dances set themselves up in gently deflating residence in the heart. If you listen carefully, you can hear them sighing in there.

For some time now – even before I began the reconstruction of love required by divorce – I have cultivated the habit of compassion, and have found that it works just as well on oneself as it does when given to others. Now, when I am not feeling happy, I notice the human tendency to take out the lash and, depending on one’s personality, either self-flagellate or go looking for someone else to sadden.

That angry dog doesn’t get out of the house much anymore: once you begin being kind to yourself, you collect all sorts of hobbies and activities that help you feel good. You sing a song. You work in the garden. You write. You call a family member, or a friend who can hear you, and share the day. You make a good meal.

Or, you take the wood that you bought the other week, the box of 2-1/2" screws and drill-as-screwdriver, and build yourself two risers for your standing desk. You take the broken cutting board that hadn’t quite made it into the fire pit and offer it a reprieve: with four bricks stolen from your woodpile cover, you lift that monitor right up to eye level (chin up, friend!). Then slide those surplus-store standing pads right where the straight-jacket-chair used to sit, and you look out the window at the apple tree full of birds (it is just beginning to set fruit), the flowers above the rock wall beyond, and the white clouds and blue backdrop that are flying up and over you, north to south.

There – doesn’t that feel better?

Here’s what I think: there is only gain when you accept commitment. It’s like the science experiment that can end any which way (and probably will), but where every result, if you are a good Life Scientist, is useful; and any conclusion that you have forced or fudged ends up just as Done, but far less Satisfying. Why not try out a standing desk? Why not love? Why not start a family? Why not protest the politics of fear? Why not plant a garden, why not stop long enough to tell your children they are more important than anything in world?

Well, tomorrow morning we begin the next phase of this little construction project. Unless my feet or my legs mutiny, it will probably continue with my rustic 2 x 4 lumber until I find another house, and the desire to make my working space even more attractive.