I’ve decided on doing at least 200 press-ups a day now. After a couple of efforts, I’m not finding it hard to do. I’m not out of breath and not red in the face, so there’s no reason for me not to. In fact, I want to do more right now. I would do that, but I have this to do, and I need to sit on my bike for a few minutes this evening too. And I have some reading to get on with.

Accidentally, I think I might have discovered the old fashioned idea of work life balance. One I have a job, and two I have spare time. To be honest, work isn’t very busy right now, and I’ve always had some spare time. The difference in this case is that I feel free from work in the evening and weekends. Doing things with a weight off me feels great. More importantly, I’m doing more. At this moment, I feel I could take on any problems in my way. This won’t last, but it might get me to Christmas. And then there’s a fresh new year.

Plans. I must make plans! Not at the moment though, I’m in the flow.

Oh! Lost it now. The BBC News Channel has distracted me. The US mid term elections were yesterday and I’m trying not to comment on it. I was trying to block out Brexit too. And my only protection against it is believing in a brighter tomorrow. When I do that, things don’t feel so bad. Everyone needs to try and do that, and when they’re at it try and take steps towards it.

I’m feeling hungry. Is that a real hunger, or a nothing else to do hunger? I know that I’ve eaten enough, so I’m going with the idea that hunger isn’t what I’m feeling. This is becoming confusing, but if I can become more aware I can make more use of how I feel and what my body is telling me. And I’ve decided that this is telling me to feel the buzz of being alive and push on. Perhaps it was the press-ups.

Many people have written about how humans (in our case homo sapiens) would have been adapted to their hunter gatherer lifestyles and would have been more skilled and more adapted to their environments in ways we can only imagine. Sometimes our senses are mixed up and people have synesthesia where the can hear colours for example. Synesthesia is more common in women, and men generally are affected by colour blindness. And for both of these there must have been an evolutionary advantage. Our senses and emotions may have evolved for ancient environments too.

Every school child is brought up with the idea that we have five senses, but we know that other animals now and in the past would have had more than smell, touch, taste, sight, and vision. We have more, but these are normally wrapped up with what we call talent. These talents could be in all of us and all we need to work out is how to activate our genes which we inherited.

The concept of activating genes which are there and not switched on is a new theory. What happens is that we adapt to our surroundings. I suppose the trick would be to find out which ones are useful and we could try activities that switch them on. We could go for a walk in the woods or start using our imaginations. Maybe designing our work and home environments would improve things for us. On the other hand, poor environments and poor imaginations could switch the anti-social and aggressive genes on.

Whether we enable good genes or bad genes on is mainly out of our control as individuals (dividuals as discussed before in a previous post). And as a society we must take care. Humans are only human, and we are a slave to genes and chemicals in our bodies.

Once again, I promise something funny at some point.