Sans Fig Leaf
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"Simple?"
17 May, 2007
A friend was talking about a long struggle with recurring back pain. "The specialist I'd been sent to was talking about surgeries--not one, but several--and I was getting freaked. Then a friend who was a physical therapist asked, 'Have you tried more exercise?' I admitted I didn't really exercise. We talked about it. I started walking a half hour every day, doing some simple stretches and such. Guess what? The back pain started going away. Six months of just a small amount of regular exercise, and I felt better than I had in years."
Sometimes simple solutions really are the answer. But for every useful simple solution to a problem, there can be dozens of simple non-solutions. Simple isn't enough. It also has to be correct.
I've never been very good with hot weather. Throughout most of my life hot, sunny days made me just want to curl up and sleep somewhere until the sun set. I would get cranky and moody if forced to stay out in the sunshine too often. With all the northern european relatives on both sides of my family tree (particularly all those fair-skinned irish people), I've always been prone to sunburn. I am not joking when I say that my skin knows how to do only three colors: a pale bluish pink, bright lobster red, and after the sunburn fades, pale bluish pink with freckles. Sunblock doesn't help much. I routinely use the super sunblock, the stuff sold for babies? And I still get sunburned.
So I did my best to avoid outside activities during the warm summer months. It was the simple solution.
Then one day I was seeing a new eye doctor. Part way through the exam she asked me, "Do you tend to get headaches on bright sunny days? Do you get sleepy or moody if you're out in the sun too much?"
I said that I experienced all of those things.
"I thought so," she said. "See, your retinas don't have any pigment at all. That's not uncommon in blue-eyed people, but you need to understand what that means. Your eyes are much more sensitive to ultraviolet damage than other people's. You should never, ever go outside, even when it's overcast, without UV protection for your eyes. And you should stick to the wrap-around styles of sunglasses, to keep out even the incidental light. If you start doing that, you'll start enjoying sunny days a lot more."
I followed her advice and discovered something.
Sunny days are fun!
That may sound like a trivial conclusion, but before I knew the extent of precautions I should take, it was very hard for me to enjoy bright, sunny days. And it's more than just protecting my eyes. What was happening to my eyes was even more subtle than a sunburn. You may not think a sunburn is subtle. But you don't feel the early stages of a sunburn. It's not until the damage passes a critical level that you become aware that you've fried your skin.
Now that I know, I can take the precautions, and I can compensate when the precautions aren't sufficient. As the cliche goes, knowing is half the battle.
But only half. It's not enough to know a solution. We also have to put it into action. Being told that simple, regular exercise will help with back pain doesn't do any good unless one actually does the exercise. I could buy dozens of pairs of UV-blocking sunglasses, but unless I go out and try to have fun, the fun won't come on its own.
Sometimes a solution doesn't work out the first time. For example, when I first started making the effort to do more things outdoor in sunny weather, I kept getting sunburns on the top of my head. I started wearing hats--and learned that light colored hats with brims were good at both reducing the sunburn and kept me from overheating.
Again, that sounds like a trivial conclusion. And if someone had simply asked me whether a hat might prevent one's head from getting sunburned, I would have said, "Of course." But we don't always think before we do things. And even when we have thought a subject through, we allow our assumptions and habits determine which avenues of thought we pursue. For various reasons I thought of hats as primarily things one wore to keep warm in cold weather. So it just didn't occur to me until I'd gotten burned.
That's okay. I lived, I learned, I changed my assumptions, and managed to have a good time.
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