I Got Rhythm

By Paul Roberts

Most of you who follow Grow Me a Story are fairly well connected to Carol Woolum-Roberts through her social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, etc. That means you’ve seen more pictures and posts about her trip to Sun Valley with her sorority pledge class this past weekend than I have. I’m always glad to see extrovert Carol head off to spend some special time with her friends, but when she is gone, it throws off my rhythm.

Science tells us we all have a biological clock, a clock that keeps our body’s functions following a set of various rhythms. Our biological clock tells us when to eat, when to sleep. This biological clock can be influenced by external factors like sunrise, sunset, a clock on a wall, or a puppy waking early in the morning to its own biological clock. 

“For four months early in 1989, a young woman named Stefania Follini remained voluntarily underground. She stayed in a plexiglass module…about the size of a comfortably sized living room…There was no sunlight, no clock, no way of telling time at all. She did her work alone under conditions that were comfortable but timeless. The question was: What would this do to her biological clock, her innate sense of time? The answer was that the biological clock went to pieces during a prolonged period without external clues.” (Isaac Asimov, Frontiers, p. 114)

Asimov goes on to recount the changes Ms. Follini experienced: working up to thirty hours at a time, sleeping for twenty-four hours at a time, eating less (she lost 17 pounds - not a diet I would suggest), and when she emerged she was convinced that she had been sequestered for only two months, not the actual four months of the experiment.

One of the things that I have discovered over the last few years at Grow Me a Story is how important the rhythm of a daily routine is to my general state of mind. The more consistent I can be with my daily “sowing seeds” journal each morning, the more even keeled I feel, the more positive my attitude. Just by scribbling regularly on a piece of paper. For me, each one of the tools in our toolkit is a safeguard against the general malaise I can feel when my gal is away on a trip. But she’s back now.  

I got rhythm

I got music

I got my gal

Who could ask for anything more?

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What throws off your rhythm? What tools do you use to get back in step again?

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