I have seen some pretty scary obesity studies this week and I have always thought that sugar was the devil. Since my children were born, I have tried to limit it, replace it, negotiate around it, and keep it away from them as much as possible in their lives. But this summer, I changed my mind just a little bit. We were in Europe for 5 weeks this summer and we wanted the boys to enjoy the local foods. For 8-year-old boys, “food” translates into dessert and treats. And we wanted them to eat croissants and tarts and all the delicious things in France and the amazing wienerbrød in Denmark. Food was part of experiencing the culture of each country with all of their senses. I also realized that Orangina is available almost everywhere in Europe and it has long been on my list for acceptable kid beverages (It is essentially just juice and bubbling water, no added sugar). So we allowed them to have a treat and an Orangina every day. For the treat, candy would have been off-limits, but they never asked about that. My boys are thin and extremely active and tall for their age. They both do sports for extracurricular activities and they also run, jump, play hard, and are generally very active people who burn lots and lots of calories. They eat very few carbs–that is bread, pasta, potatoes, etc. They get most of their carbs from fruit. Still with the daily treat, they gained a little weight. But it seemed to be good for them. One of them has always been very thin. He filled out a little. And he seemed less slight and more grounded in his body. The other added a little weight to his body but has gotten leaner now that he is back to the twice a week swim team routine. It has made me rethink my “sugar is the devil” mantra. Could it be that moderation in the sugar department might actually be good...
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I always feel a little odd when I think about my “roots.” Same with blood and blood lines and “family ties.” It is because I am adopted and I simply don’t know how to “hold” these words in my soul. I simply haven’t ever been able to make a decision about how to think about these concepts. I have always known it would be easier if I had some… conviction about it. It is the indecision that comes with having to choose which family to identify with as my connection to the past, my ancestors. It leaves me feeling a bit lost. I know I could decide to call either my biological family my “roots” or my adopted family my “family ties.” But neither quite feels true to me. I have always been comforted by the stories in both families that I am a tiny bit Cherokee. Somehow by having the same lineage in both families, it is true. I feel connection to the possessions of those I loved and those of their ancestors that they loved. I feel less connected to family reunions, family trees, and the concept of “ancestors.” When I was 21 years old my birth mother searched for me. I met her and much of her family. They were nice people and I enjoyed visiting with them. I was in a relationship with them for a while and then for a variety of reasons backed away for a number of years. I reconnected with my birth mother a few years ago. It is a fairly casual relationship now–we talk by phone a few times a year. I have liked the concept of genealogy and tracing roots since I first heard of it. I love the idea of being a detective, tracing people through genealogical lines and learning their stories. But I always stop before I engage because I wouldn’t know which family to trace. Neither feels right. My biological family because it is lacking the love—I don’t really care how...
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For the last couple of years I have been doing some work with a great guy named Kevin Behr who wrote The Phoenix Project. He works in the space of IT and continuous improvement and helps organizations get better at what they do. One of the ways they get better fast is to control Work in Progress or WIP, which led me to the concept of “Kanban” (rhymes with bonbon) and I’ve been curious about it for a while now. What’s a Kanban, you might ask… Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: Kanban (かんばん(看板)?) (literally signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time (JIT) production.[2]Kanban is a system to control the logistical chain from a production point of view, and is not an inventory control system. Kanban was developed by Taiichi Ohno, at Toyota, to find a system to improve and maintain a high level of production. Kanban is one method through which JIT is achieved.[3] Kanban became an effective tool in support of running a production system as a whole, and it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvement. Problem areas were highlighted by reducing the number of Kanban in circulation. That all sounds great for manufacturing, right? But why would I want a personal Kanban? I asked Kevin for a book recommendation to further explore the Kanban concept and he recommended Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson. It is about using a Kanban system to help organize the complex and disparate tasks we all juggle. That is why last night I woke up in the middle of the night and spent a couple of hours creating my own personal Kanban. This book is almost diabolically simple and yet offers a solution to the management of life’s complexity by “managing work.” This idea of calling the complex lists of tasks in my life “work” helps me think about them in a new way. The book suggests we can only focus on one task at a time, thus we should only be actually working on a small number of tasks at any...
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