2D View In A 3D World

Catherine had really difficult pregnancies.

She’s young, vibrant and healthy (and really fucking hot) so none of the difficulty was based on anything controllable.

We had an ultrasound appointment about 4 months into our pregnancy with Fiona. After five minutes the tech made the sound you never want to hear from a medical professional during an exam.

“Oh.”

She scanned, then rescanned, then scanned the same area over and over again.

Our hearts had started to race and any audible sigh the tech made began to sound like the high pitch strings that played while Norman Bates stabbed that woman in the shower scene.

Catherine’s placenta had basically developed in the worst spot possible.

It made the remainder of the pregnancy incredibly difficult mentally and physically.

My athletic, overachieving wife had to stay off her feet for the rest of the pregnancy, and have a scheduled C-Section.

But it was nothing anyone could control.

It was just a quirk of nature, and a misstep in the miracle of life.

Luckily everything went relatively smoothly during delivery, and Catherine and Fiona were happy and healthy.

Except there were lingering side effects that we only found out about once Murphy was conceived.

At the 4 month mark we were again at our new ultrasound office, and the tech made that familiar, blood curdling “oh” sound that’s supposed to hide concern, but only magnifies it.

I watched Catherine turn pale and I could read her mind.

“Not this shit again.”

Both of our hearts and minds instantly went into panic mode. Each expression and lip curl of the new tech felt like another cinematic stab right in our hearts.

The doctor came in and we talked about what was potentially going on.

It was a lot of information, and we had a lot of questions so we made our way back to his office to speak in private.

Once we were in there he explained the complications of pregnancy technology. Things could be read in a myriad ways, things could be interpreted in just as many ways.

He assured us that what his tech saw wasn’t a reason for extra concern.

He told us:

“You have to remember, we’re viewing a 3D problem in 2D technology. There’s a lot more going on down there than we can see with the tech, I am not concerned but I understand why you are.”

We were so hyper-focused on one problem that we lost track of the whole situation.

We were so close to the one familiar, traumatic tree that we forgot we were in a forest.

At the end of World War 1 a German Engineer named Arthur Scherbius invented, patented and manufactured a cipher machine under the brand name Enigma.

His firm originally sold it for commercial use, but the Wehrmacht adopted it for military use before the start of World War 2.

The Nazi Army used Enigma to encode messages from command to their deployed forces in secrecy. It would allow their next movements to be unopposed.

The Enigma Machine baffled British and French intelligence for the first half of the war. It was a large reason why Germany was so successful in their early march to continental dominance.

The British and French spent half a decade trying to crack these machine generated codes, but never had any luck. No matter how many men, resources and time they invested in solving the problem they could never produce a solution.

Since the Enigma Machine broke words and language up into undecipherable phrases the British and French assumed the solution had to be based in linguistics.

They were viewing a 3D problem through a 2D lens. The function of the machine was much more nuanced than just a typewriter that scrambled letters.

They didn’t take into account the mathematics governing the function of the actual machine.

They were only focusing on the ciphers it created.

The Polish Cypher Bureau didn’t think the solution would be found in the words.

A young officer named Marian Rejewski viewed the machine as a mathematical equation. He was able to work out the precise interconnections between the machinery, mirrors and ink blot of the Enigma Machine.

He used his calculations to create a replica of the Enigma machine.

They were finally able to decrypt German messages.

By finally viewing the entirety of the problem the Polish were able to solve it.

So how does this apply to fitness?

Imagine you’ve lost 50 pounds this year, but you’re pissed off because your goal was to lose 60. And those last 10 pounds won’t come off no matter what you do.

You’ve consistently gone to the gym and consistently eaten well for the last 11 ¾ months. 

So you assume the solution must be to go to the gym harder.  Eat even more clean.  Eat even less. 

That’s the only tree you see. 

But that tree isn’t going to get those last 10 pounds off.

It’s only going to cause your blood pressure to rise, your teeth to clench and your hands to ball into tight fists as you get more and more frustrated. 

If you take a breath and look up you’ll see there are hundreds of other trees forming the complex forest of human biology.

Focusing on things like sleep, recovery and stress management will always be the solution for those stubborn last few pounds.  To see that you need to look past your single problem. 

It’s human nature to solely focus on the single issue in front of us.

Catherine and I were so used to getting bad medical news that we only saw that tree.  No matter who we were talking to, if anything came up we assumed that we were going to get another weird, 1 in 1 million diagnosis.

The British and French were so convinced the Enigma Machine could only be solved using words.  They spent years and millions of dollars doubling down on the only tree they saw. 

Focusing on a single tree only made each problem worse.  Catherine and I nearly had heart attacks, and the British and French wasted years and millions of dollars.

None of these problems were solved until they were viewed as a part of a nuanced, complicated, sometimes contradictory forest of life.

You just need to lift your fucking head up every once in a while. 

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