When I was younger, I ate just about anything. I had no great worries about weight gain. I didn’t have to worry about cholesterol.
As the years passed, my body chemistry changed. Now I do have to worry about what I eat and how much. The extra pounds are harder to peel off, and my LDL and HDL are two numbers I’ve gotten to know intimately. What it’s meant is the need to effect a change in lifestyle.
Having to change your lifestyle stinks. The old, comfortable and familiar ways of behaving are disrupted by the demand to think and behave differently. Lifestyle changing can be painful. If you don’t believe me, ask the folks over at U.S. Postal Service headquarters who are going through a “lifestyle” change of their own.
The four years preceding Bill Henderson’s appointment as postmaster general were the closest the USPS has come to having salad days. The nation’s economy was rock solid. Businesses were thriving; mail volume and revenue were growing.
These days, mail volume and revenue growth come more slowly. The rock upon which the nation’s economy has been based has suffered a fracture or two. Intensified competition from alternative carriers and electronic technology now means the USPS can’t pass along cost increases to postal rate payers with impunity. “No rate increases greater than inflation” has become a postal mantra, and Henderson has made clear he expects his troops to march to a different drummer.
Oh, there’s grousing all right. In a way, I can sympathize. Learning to “eat to live” rather than “living to eat” has been tough. But I’m not sure how to describe the lifestyle change taking place at the USPS. Without a doubt it’s been no barrel of laughs. Telling career bureaucrats they have to do more with less can bring gasps and groans that sound like a death rattle.
Yup. Lifestyle changes sure can stink. But they’re worth going through since the pain they impose often pays off in a better quality of life.
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