[ home | Team | Links | Self Reliance | News-Politics | Books | Career-O-meter| Alpine | Finance | Travel ]

Seabhaid is Gaelic. It means wandering around aimlessly or without direction, which is how I have felt many times during races, training or in my professional career. It is pronounced "She-vetch".

Five Stages of Getting Lost

1. Deny you are disoriented and press on with growing urgency attempting to make your mental map fit where you are.  I'll learn different things and move up the company with advancements

2. As you realize that you are generally lost, the urgency blossoms into a full scale survival emergency.  Clear thoughts becomes impossible and action becomes frantic, unproductive and even dangerous. I'll improve my market worth by going back to school for my MBA

3.  Usually following injury or exhaustion, you expend the chemicals of emotion and form a strategy for finding some place that matches the mental map.  It's a misguided strategy for there is no such place now.  You are lost.  If they keep taking away benefits, I'll leave this company and they will be sorry

4. Deteriorate both rationally and emotionally as the strategy fails to resolve the conflict.  Geez, management really does know what they are doing.

5. Run out of options and become resigned to your plight.  Like it or not you must make a new mental map of where you are. To survive you  must find yourself . Then it won't matter where you are.  One day at a time and I think I can make it to retirement or EER in 2009.

As of March 2007,  I'm at Stage 5. I think I've found my direction. A lifesaver has been thrown to me and the ship is sinking.  It's called EER, Early Elective Retirement!

At first I was uncertain, but now I'm not so sure.

See Career-o-meter

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."  Henry David Thoreau

"The busy man is never wise, and the wise man is never busy." Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang

"The paradox of our time in history is that we may have achieved building taller buildings but have shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry too quickly, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom." George Carlin

Probably the most significant and pervasive characteristic of the human pleasure machine is that people are much more sensitive to negative than positive stimuli...Think about how well you feel today and then try to imagine how much better you could feel. There are a few things that could make you feel better but the number of things that would make you feel worse is unbounded. " Tverski

"If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness. "Jack Handy

This be the verse, Phillip Larkin