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bucket list, Midieval Times, stretch goals, taekwondo

Crazy or Inspired, Life on the Border

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I know no proper word for the insanity of my house.  We range from extremely caring to insane, and it’s tiring. 
O had a belt test for his Taekwondo this past week.  He had parents in fits of laughter watching him try to wait his turn.  Evidently he was sucking his toes while standing on one leg.  Have I mentioned his crazy balance?  I wish I had been there to see it, but I’ve heard enough people recount his craziness to believe them.  The boy simply can’t sit still, and often the levels of insanity are funny…but sometimes they are just scary.  Last night, he opened his window all the way and was sitting in the window.  The screen was bowing out, but he had no idea he was in danger of falling out of the second story window.  I regret my favorite word derived from Latin is “defenestration” because I like the sound and every parent to whom I’ve talked, ponders something similar at some point.    
These moments are why I have been staying up late with him rather than sending him to bed when he isn’t “ready for bed.”  I want some relax time before I head to bed after having played the part of daddy since 6am, but at 10:30 pm I find I have little left save to take meds and put dogs to sleep before I crash.  We have to bring this up today with his doc who said, “Some kids just don’t need as much sleep.  Just let him wander.”  We can’t.
We celebrated O’s birthday late this year to be able to go to Midieval Times for dinner with the kids.  He has wanted to go for more than a year, and he picked going here over having more friends to a cheaper venue…Have I ever mentioned how lucky we are to be able to go to a place like this?  The food was surprisingly good, and the show had O and A sucked in completely.  I had to laugh when A wanted to go care for the knight who had been “slain.”  She asked if maybe we should go help him.  O on the other hand just wanted the knight who beat our knight to die!  My kids frequently are the Ying and the Yang.
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As for me, have you ever felt like you are juggling a lot of things to the point where one more thing will cause a huge mess?  That’s my feeling lately.  I never learned to juggle, not even soccer balls when I played for 20 years.  I go back to the complex theory of last week.  At some point, the nervous system has no slack to absorb another interruption, and depending on where it happens, multiple parts of the system can go down.  That’s what everything feels like this week, like a system humming along with no slack, no contingency plans.
The worst part is the pride I feel in not dropping any thing yet when I should be looking for somebody else to target in a toss or picking what I will/can let drop. 
I say this having just signed up to run a half marathon on Dec. 1st.  The goal which seemed so far away when I put it on my bucket list almost 7 years ago is worth far more than the dollars and time spent to achieve it.
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chaos, chaos theory, complex systems, complicated systems, Multiple Sclerosis, O's songs, understanding

For When the Map Fails

I was trying to conceptualize why it might be that lesions on parts of our brain thought to control a certain function within our nervous system sometimes have no immediate impact on the particular function.  I have long explained it to people as our nervous system being like a giant road system with signals traveling along our nerves to their destination.  A pot hole on a road may make it totally impassible or merely feel like a bump to the big rig traveling over it at 65mph.  In a similar vein, the road being impassible may be big problem if it is on a major highway, or it might just mean taking another almost equally fast route through the neighborhood.  Without knowledge of the severity or the equivalence of alternatives, determining the impact is difficult.  At least this is how I have always pictured and explained the relationship between my MS with roughly a dozen and a half lesions and my moderately good functioning thus far.  While I think this conceptualization normally adequate, I think it is likely an attempt to make a complex system into a complicated one.
A complicated system is one where there are many relationships, but they can pretty much be tracked/mapped.  For example, if the light is red, all traffic should stop.  If there are 20 lights between work and home, it will take me getting a green light 20 times to get home.  That’s 20 different relationships between my movement and the lights.  I shouldn’t be able to get home faster than the time it takes to complete each of those requirements.  One can add in a few other requirements like if my car has a flat, it will take me another 20 minutes to change the tire.  One can add more relationships, and the equation becomes more complicated, but the system isn’t a complex system.
A complex system is one where there are so many interrelationships between variables such that the overall function of the system is not easily discernible from the parts.  The whole is greater than the parts.  If we were to look at the entire brain, would we be able to say this part of the brain tells my fingers to type, and this part says to love my wife?  Without those parts, could the brain still tell my fingers to type and me to love my wife?  Perhaps the real problem with the road map is the attempt to assign a function of the entire system to a part.  If so, the complex nature of the nervous system rather than the complicated road map model could be the reason I have thus far been lucky to have so few and comparatively mild symptoms thus far.

Of course, this says little from any predictive standpoint.  I still have no way to know if tomorrow will have the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back moment.  It may be the day I can’t see or walk, but isn’t this true for everyone whether they have MS or not?  As I ponder our nervous system, I can appreciate the need for belief.  It’s easy to get caught up believing we understand.  Physics went hundreds of years on Newton’s laws because they agreed with what we observe.  However, there is a whole layer of reality underneath when we start studying the atom.  Likewise, I tend to think the road map model adequate for 99 percent of what I have experienced with MS thus far, but for the other 1 percent I think I shall henceforth just attribute the difference to the complexity of the mind body relationship.

 

Perhaps the complex model rather than the complicated model is what is missing in our understanding of why MS has the impacts it does.  Perhaps this is why MRI’s looking for lesions or brain atrophy seem to give relevant information but may be only giving one part of a complex story.  I still go back to us not knowing the right questions, and I think more and more this is likely the result of incomplete conceptual models for our nervous system.

Funny parenting note of the week:
When O acted out this weekend, he had to go to the corner.  In the corner, he was continuing to try and get attention.  For some reason, he thought sing/shouting, “I am so sexy.  That’s why they make condoms.” over and over would get him out of the corner.  We did what we usually do which is to ignore him, but both J and I were hiding our laughter on the inside.  Where the heck, do 6 year olds get this stuff?
Frustrating part of the week for me:
Both kids were misbehaving today to the point where I feel like I was screamed at 75% of the time between 6:30 am and 8:30 pm.  On one hand, I am happy to be more fit so I still have the energy to go all day, but wow.  Walking the dogs tonight was my favorite part of a very very long day, the second in a row like it.

After reading the annual report from my high school, I am reminded, “Rursus incipiemus nunc et semper.”   – Always we begin again.

Tomorrow is another day in another week. One of my goals remains to always grow in understanding.

Along those lines, here is a Monday morning riddle: When does removing one from seven not leave six?

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