Back again, taste and agile
Why you should always lift with your legs and shouldn't ask you team to justify their work every day
I hurt my back this week.
I was dragging a too-heavy bin that I had overfilled with rubble up some steps to the curbside when I started to feel the strain in my lower back. Even as I was doing it, I thought to myself: “this is the sort of thing people hurt their back doing”. But I kept tugging and kept hurting my back.
How do you “lift with your legs” anyway, when trying to drag a too-heavy bin that you have over-filled up some too-big steps? (This was my justification to myself as I tugged at it while my back spasmed.)
Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those articles where the writer becomes shocked by the prospect of their own mortality. Although I was shocked by the prospect of my own mortality. I had done my back in. This is how it begins, I thought. (I am 35). First, you do your back in. Then you start making an audible grunt when getting into or out of armchairs. I’m not sure what’s after that really. Probably a small funeral with tiny supermarket sausage rolls where the attendees calculate the delicate balance between staying long enough to be polite and leaving early enough to avoid the traffic.
The problem with the bin was that once I started dragging it up the steps, I wanted to complete the task. I just need to get it over this step, I thought. And then the next couple of steps as well, and then along the uneven lane, and then that’s done and I can rest. I’ll just push through this pain and hope it all goes away.
Perhaps I was caught off guard because it’s been a long time since I’ve hurt myself doing something. In my line of work, back pain comes from sitting too much. I’m not used to pain being the result of exertion. (I guess I’m not used to exertion full stop).
I come from a long line of people who have struggled to do things they really shouldn’t be doing and consequently hurt themselves. My Dad gave himself a hernia moving a fridge on his own. My Grandma broke a hip when she fell off a chair trying to change a curtain rail. Both of my Grandads fell over doing things in their homes on their own and then struggled for several hours to get up rather than calling for help.
Is it pride? Certainly, the male members of my family are over-represented in this category. And let’s be honest, it’s mainly men that are too proud to call for help when trying to move something heavy. I don’t even consider myself particularly proud. And certainly, if I am, it isn’t for my physical brute strength. I’d like to be remembered for my nuanced thoughts, not my ability to move a bin on my own. If anything I take pride in not having spent years picking up heavy things and putting them down again. I wonder if rather than pride it’s a mixture of impatience and independence. I wanted to get rid of this bin, and I wanted to exercise that want immediately without needing to coordinate with anyone else. Calling for help would have meant waiting for someone else.
But I find myself fast-forwarding ahead in my imagined life. Today I’m 35 and dragging a bin. In 20 years’ time, I will move a fridge and feel a ping in my lower abdomen. 20 years after that I will stand on a chair and overbalance. Right now, I am cavalier about standing on chairs. But I’m not sure you wake up one day and think: “I’ve reached an age where I shouldn’t stand on chairs anymore.” I suspect you only discover that through experience - once it’s too late. There’s a line in the book Being Wrong by Kathryn Schultz that I think about quite a lot. She muses on what it feels like to be wrong: “Being wrong does feel like something,” she says, “it feels like being right”.
So perhaps this is a near-miss reminder and warning to us all (and by us all, I mean me specifically) that we don’t want to be that person who injures themselves trying to blast through a task they shouldn’t be doing on their own. How much better to be not in pain and to get some help with that curtain rail. I say this now, and I really mean it, but I also notice that there’s something fallen behind the fridge, and I reckon I can just pull that out of the way and get it. No need to bother anyone and make a big deal out of it, I’ll just get that done, even if it means I need to pull it out from that alcove at a weird angle.
Elsewhere
1 If you are interested in articles about being people shocked by their own mortality, I recommend this one by Tim Dowling in the Guardian, which manages to be wry enough that it doesn’t become another writer discovering aging all over again from scratch:
Being old also means having to contend with the enormous, invisible volume of everything you have done and completely forgotten about. At the age of 20 you’ve lived so little you can remember virtually all of it; by the age of 60 you will have forgotten entire holidays, scores of books you’ve read, hundreds of arguments, upwards of a thousand former acquaintances, all the popular music released between 1999 and 2004, and at least 10 Netflix passwords. This isn’t memory loss – just a natural shedding of things your brain has deemed superfluous.
2 And going 2 for 2 on articles with numbered lists, I really liked these musings on “taste” by Brie Wolfson:
Appreciation is a form of taste. Creation is another. They are often intertwined, but don’t have to be. Someone could have impeccable taste in art, without producing any themselves. Those who create tasteful things are almost always deep appreciators, though. Mark Ronson listens to and loves *a lot* of music. Samin Nosrat tries and savors *a lot* of food.
Though taste may appear effortless, you can’t have taste by mistake. It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention. It’s a process of peeling back layer after layer, turning over rock after rock.
3 A long read by Miriam Posner about Agile, the software development methodology, that really touches on a lot of thoughts I’ve been having recently. I’m a very strong advocate for taking an agile approach when building software (and anything really), but I also notice that as teams get bigger a lot of the nuance and thought gets turned into dogma:
Despite this flexibility in its definition, many developers have lost faith in the idea of Agile. Wischweh himself encountered a turning point while describing a standup meeting to an aunt, a lawyer. She was incredulous. The notion that a competent professional would need to justify his work every day, in tiny units, was absurd to her. Wischweh began to think about the ways in which Agile encourages developers to see themselves as cogs in a machine.
I know exactly the sort of stand-ups Wischweh is describing. I have a love-hate relationship with stand-ups. I think they’re really important to keep alignment, but I also spot so many done poorly. There are the ones where everyone passes around a soft toy and recites what they did yesterday and what they’ll do today until the circle is complete and they can all go. And there are the ones where people check-in on what they’re about to do, ask for help if necessary. Where managers are there to unblock rather than to corral. The latter is clearly superior but at scale and under pressure it’s easy to see stand-ups disintegrate into the former.
That is all for this time,
Yours,
Simon