Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Bruce Lee. “Obey the principles without being bound by them.” Now there’s something to chew on for a bit.

2) Simplicity. Travel advice to young people on the road: If hungry, eat. If tired, sleep.

Reminds me of the 3 essential rules of a surgery residency: Eat when you can, drink when you can, and don’t [mess] with the pancreas.

3) Participate. My friend Scott has been bitten by the CrossFit as Sport bug. He’a a former wrestler and 400M runner, so the guy has a history of physical suffering going way back. He seems to enjoy this new competition, enough so that he headed to the far, far side of the other side of our city for a competition. His pre-comp jitters notwithstanding (I can’t figure out if this is a good part of the experience for him, or a bad part), he came away victorious.

The pre-game jitters are an indication that my friend was preparing to compete, not just to participate. Me? I’m done with true competition against others, at least athletically. I occasionally jump into events, but for me it’s for the purpose of participation. Kinda like the Open, I’m there for the camaraderie, to be part of an enjoyable conversation. CrossFit for me is a means to an end, a vehicle to drive me to a healthier, more fit version of mid-life bingo. When push comes to shove I am no longer willing, or maybe even able, to do what is necessary to really try to win at CrossFit, the sport.

Is Scott right, or am I? The answer, of course, is “yes”.

4) Essential. There were, once upon a time, epic conversations that took place here about all manner of topics. The most memorable ones were about CrossFit. Back in the day folks who were there at the beginning, some from the original CrossFit Santa Cruz including Coach himself, would weigh in on fundamentals, programming, progressions and the like. It could get pretty hairy at times; there were some awfully strong personalities hanging around. These conversations are now occurring elsewhere, which is a shame, but they still go on. I’d like to share my thoughts on one of them.

The issue of programming is always on the table. Is there an optimal version of CrossFit programming? People take turns at supporting and denigrating the programming here on the Main Page, and countless efforts are made to “improve” on the model you see here. Some of these alternatives make sense, while others IMO are not really alternative CrossFit programming but alternatives TO CrossFit. Most of these, indeed most of the conversations in general, have to do with strength and strength training. Are you (is anyone) strong enough? Will CrossFit.com or another version of CrossFit make you strong enough?

Here’s a little bit of homework for you: look up “The 10 Essential Elements of Fitness.” They can be found in CFJ #2, “What is Fitness”, and they are also posted on 030530 ( ironically on a day when heavy Deadlifts were prescribed). Pretty much all of the conversations noted above revolve around the premise that strength is somehow more important than other elements of fitness. Reasonable people can disagree on this point, but as a premise in discussing CrossFit the notion that strength is a, or the, primary element of fitness has no standing. There are 10 elements of Fitness, each no more and no less important than any other if we are seeking a broad, inclusive general physical preparedness that we call “fitness”. Full stop.

Whoa, wait a minute there bingo, aren’t you the guy who co-wrote an article called “Strong Medicine” introducing a programming alternative called “CrossFit Strength Bias”? Isn’t that statement there just a bit, oh, duplicitous? Forked-tongue typing?

Nope. Not at all. You see, if you read the article you will see that CFSB is one way to address a DEFICIT in strength relative to the other 9 Essential Elements, not a program meant to gain strength at the EXPENSE of the other 9. As such it, like some others, is a program for the common CrossFitter who perceives a hole in his/her fitness that needs to be addressed, not at all unlike a CrossFitter who does supplemental work in gymnastics or Oly lifting or mobility. Additional Element-specific work, be it strength or agility or whatnot, that drives continued balance and improvement in all 10 Elements is very much CrossFit.

CrossFit is outcome based. The outcome desired is a broad-based fitness comprised of equal quantities of each of 10 Essential Elements. What goes into the left side of the hypothetical Black Box should produce Work Capacity Across Broad Time and Modal Domains if the Black Box is a CrossFit athlete of any type. An increase in your Deadlift should be accompanied by a decrease in your 5K run and your “Fran” time.

Programming for CrossFit should aim for CrossFit outcomes. Full stop.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at June 22, 2014 5:34 AM

Sunday musings…

1) World Cup. One of the few events in the sporting world that can make a golf tournament seem like an “edge of the seat” event by comparison.

2) Bikini. It’s that time of year. Ads, articles, blog posts, all with the hook “How to get a bikini body.” I think I’ve got this one.

In order to get a Bikini body, put on a Bikini. You now have a Bikini body. .

QED.

3) Triple Crown. Well, another year has come and gone and the winner of the first two jewels of the Triple Crown has once again failed to seal the deal. 30 or 40 some years since the last winner Affirmed. A certain segment of the racing crowd is now calling for changes in the format because it apparently is too hard, unfairly hard to win all three.

Sigh. So typical, eh?

If you are of a certain vintage and pay any attention to horse racing you doubtless remember that there was a similar hue and cry in the decades before Secretariat. Funny thing, though, after Secretariat came in rapid succession Seattle Slew and Affirmed, followed swiftly by cries that the Triple Crown was TOO EASY! No longer a significant achievement. Change was necessary to make it harder to achieve.

Equally typical.

At the end of the day there are certain benchmarks that exist for whatever reason, achievements which have some sort of historical relevance regardless of their age or the frequency with which they occur. The Triple Crown of horse racing. A Triple Crown in MLB. The sub-4:00 mile. Some of them have never been achieved. The Grand Slam in professional golf or tennis for example. The difficulty and rarity of the achievements are precisely what makes them special.

Those who seek to make it easier to reach these milestones are actually saying more about themselves than they are about the relative difficulty of making these particular grades. It’s all about them, what they think, how they feel. California Chrome was magnificent in the face of an injury that went unseen, his valor proven despite the fact that the racing world was denied a Triple Crown yet again. So close, in something so hard. Who would seek to cheapen such an effort?

Each time Mount Everest is re-measured it is found to have grown higher.

4) Father’s Day. What? You thought I’d let one of these slip by without a bit of musing? Don’t be silly.

I literally just put my Dad in a car and kissed him goodbye as Mrs. bingo drives him and my Mom (escorted by my brother and his wife) to the airport. In an upset family victory for the ages my Dad made the trip to Cleveburg for a visit that no one thought would occur. Hospitalized for the better part of 2013, a trip to the kitchen is a veritable cross-country foray for my Dad, and somehow everyone was able to pull it off. We were all able to spend a weekend in what is rather than dwell on what was and what’s coming.

I got to spend the weekend primarily as a son.

The other half of Father’s Day (and of course, Mother’s Day) is that the ticket to the game is a child. I’ve oft written that Father’s Day for me has always been a day when I’ve gifted myself with the privilege of being as much of a Dad as my kids could stand on that particular day. Father’s Day for me was never a day of repose, at least not when it came to anything “The Heir”, “Lovely Daughter”, and “Lil’bingo” might care to do with me.

This year my gift was to be able to revel in the act of being my Father’s son. I was able to share the simple joys of a nap in the sun, the discovery of a bush that had just flowered, and the fascination of what the wind can do to the surface of a large, shallow lake. We watched golf and hockey and soccer together, a running commentary coming from Dad like a Sports Center loop every 30 minutes, each one as identical as the TV talking heads on tape. While these are already just the faintest of shadows flickering on the farthest edges of my Dad’s mind, my brother and I will be forever blessed with memories of this weekend.

This Father’s Day weekend when we could still be our Father’s sons.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at June 15, 2014 7:15 AM

Three CrossFit injuries in less than 3:00 last night at the Box. Incredible, huh? It’s truly unbelievable when you really dig down into the details: CrossFit is even more dangerous than anyone thought, even that trainer girl who took one whole CrossFit class. Wait until you hear the details.

I was just kinda hanging around after the WOD getting ready to coach the next class when Walt cried out and crumbled to the ground. “My leg! I got this pain and now I can’t stand up!” This was pretty ominous. A clear sign that CrossFit is too dangerous to even think about. Walt had just completed the WOD and now he had so much pain in his leg that he couldn’t stand up. Whoa, if that can happen from a WOD called “Death by Pull-ups” where the only exercise you do is pull-ups, if you can have leg pain in a CrossFit Box from pull-ups, I mean, that’s pretty dangerous. Not only that, but when the pain went away in 10 or 12 seconds Walt joined in the running sessions. CrossFit makes you crazy, too!

Once I calmed down–it seemed like a fluke, leg pain after doing pull-ups–the next group started coming in the door and meandering over to the white board to check out the WOD. “Death by Pull-ups”, the minute repeater. Do one PU in the first minute, 2 in the second, and so on until you can’t finish the required number in the minute. All of a sudden, another scream. “AHHHHHHH…I ripped!” One of the members got a rip on her hand just from reading the WOD on the white board. Now THAT’S dangerous. She didn’t even have to do the WOD, didn’t do a single pull-up, and she got a rip on her palm. Right about that time I’m starting to think maybe all those CrossFit haters who say CrossFit is dangerous are on to something.

A couple of minutes later and a small group of us was chatting about CrossFit. CrossFitters tend to do that. All of a sudden–BAM!!–I can’t talk. Oh man, the pain. That’s right. You got it. I threw my jaw out just talking about CrossFit. How crazy is that?! Not only did I not do a WOD, I wasn’t even looking at the white board in preparation for the WOD. Just talking about CrossFit and I got hurt! That’s just out-of-this-world incredible. I mean, can you even imagine?

So there you have it. Here, right here on the internet, is proof that CrossFit is even more dangerous than any of those other “CrossFit is Dangerous” posts says it is. In just 3:00 time we proved that CrossFit can hurt parts of your body you didn’t even use in the WOD. You can be injured and out of commission just thinking about the WOD. And to top it all off, you can’t even be safe talking about CrossFit. It’s true. It’s gotta be, right? Here it is posted on the internet, just like all the other posts. If you are getting your information from totally legit sources like this one, well, maybe you SHOULDN’T do CrossFit. When I told Walt I was writing this and his response was “no way I’m reading that.” Turns out the last time he read a post about CrossFit he sprained his left medial rectus muscle!

Honest! I’m an eye doctor, and you just read this on the internet.

Sunday musings…

1) Triple Crown. Admit it, you really want to see one won next week.

2) Black Hole. Games.CrossFit.com. Seriously. Where did yesterday go?

3) False dichotomy. Kinda like a forced-choice testing paradigm where you’re always wrong.

4) Rich. “The rich are different from the rest of us.” F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps. But what I find fascinating, time and again, is how much the rich and the not-so-rich have in common.

Just take away some something that is truly meaningful that can’t be bought. We’re all the same, then.

5) Impending. I am 54 years old, Mrs. bingo soon to be 53. We are as in the middle as we could possibly be, the filling in the so-called “sandwich generation”. It’s the opposite of what my sage friend Hari once told me about turning 50, that the first 50 years of my life were about preparing and the next 50 were about me. And Mrs. bingo. Yet here we sit, squarely in the middle of lives in “launch” mode, and lives at the limit. So which is it? All about us, or squeezed in the sandwich from both ends of the life line?

Now THAT’S a dichotomy, false or otherwise.

You know, the bingo progeny are going to do just fine. My left-brain knows that; the right-brain angst is probably just separation anxiety. “The Heir”, “Lovely Daughter”, and “Lil’bingo” are all launched, and what their trajectories may be is largely (and appropriately) mostly out of our control, angst be damned. We may have lost the pleasure of their physical company at the dinner table, but we’ve hardly lost them otherwise. The cyber-kitchen table easily extends to each of their abodes.

The real loss to come, the loss of our own parents, is really what makes the “sandwich” so difficult. This stage has always been a participatory sport, and the final score is always the same. It may not even be any different from generations past other than the fact that we have a catchy name for our part now, “sandwich generation”. Most of us do not have our parents in our homes, so the decline we observe is all the more jarring because we see it in “jumps” rather than as a slow slide. As Baby Boomers we probably spend much more time thinking about how this all impacts US than prior generations–we could be called the “Navel-Gazing Generation, after all. In a funny way this actually gives our own parents one more opportunity to parent us by disabusing us of that rather selfish notion.

Memory is the issue for both parent and child. Happy memories bring joy and sadness, pulled to the front of our consciousness as both balm for the pain of loss and fuel for the work it takes to get through a day. Memory fades from the middle out, again for both parent and child. The toil of mid-life and the tyranny of teenagers fades as all that remains is the memory of the simplicity of early childhood joy, and the simple joy of remembering lunch.

We are in the middle of the Long Goodbye. We know not exactly when it began, and we know not how long is will last. We cling to our memories of life before as we fight not to remember life now. Mother’s Day is just past. Another Father’s Day is nigh. We steel ourselves for the time when they will be just another day, one on which we have nothing to visit but memories.

It seems that we are preparing, still, now and always.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at June 1, 2014 6:53 AM

Sunday musings (on time)…

1) Timing I. Musings is caught in the filter most Sunday mornings. I try to write and post on Saturday night, but I never have anything to say until morning.

Seems the “Sunday” part is as important as the “musings” part.

2) Timing II. Whether pessimist or optimist, grumpy or garrulous, we all seem to be more cognizant of the gloomy than the gleeful. In “A Man Without a Country” a Vonnegut character laments the fact that people fail to notice when they are happy. I think he’s on to something.

Just as there are moments of despair in the midst of a joyous occasion (think tiny slip in giving a toast at a wedding), so too are there tiny embers of joy in an otherwise stonecold firepit of despondence. To dwell on the slip in the middle of a party steals some or all of the happiness from the moment; one can revisit that tiny sorrow another time if need be.

Likewise, whether suffering or simply surfing the hours of a day, one should be ever mindful of even the tiniest moment of happiness right then and there, at the exact moment they occur. Catch them, each one, right when they happen. Feel them as deeply as possible. They, too, can be revisited at another time if need be, but they should be heralded and cherished on arrival.

3) Timing III. It’s Memorial Day weekend. We are prompted to recall the sacrifices of our fallen soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, to be ever thankful for the lives they led and lost in the service of their fellow citizens. Men like SSgt. Povilaitis, age 47, today and Corporal Ryan McGhee, age 21, 2 days ago.  The loss of both men is tragic, but the timing of their loss speaks to a different kind of tragedy, one that is a particularly painful part of Memorial Day and all it stands for.

Our War dead are often buried by their parents.

This weekend Mrs. bingo and I are attending to my Dad so that my Mom can be at my nephew’s college graduation. All of the timing here seems to be pretty much standard fare: a much older parent with his son preparing for loss coming sooner than later, while a much younger nephew/grandson prepares for his life ahead, loss only theoretical for all involved. Alas, the losses we remember on Memorial Day are upside down, with parents and sometimes grandparents the ones in mourning. The loss is all the more stunning for its lack of warning, the inability to even perceive its possibility let alone prepare for its arrival. A part of me “pre-mourns” my Dad each time I see him, but the men and women we remember on Memorial Day were ripped from families that saw only the future when they gazed upon their sons and daughters.

Here then lays our focus today, to attend to the survivors. Remember the fallen to be sure, but do so in the context of remembering what their loss meant to those left behind, and attend to the survivors.

4) Timing IV. It’s graduation season. All manner of young people graduating from all manner of circumstances and headed toward all manner of “who knows what”. At this time of year all manner of invited speakers dust off their trusty graduation platitudes as they send the graduates off to “who knows where”.  Have you been to a graduation recently? If so, you’ve been to almost EVERY graduation recently. With the exception of the University of Texas (addressed by the Commander of U.S. Special Forces, a Navy SEAL), each and every graduation speech constitutes a kind of  simultaneous Groundhog Day, each graduate hearing some version of the same speech, all likely to be told some version of “Just Breathe”.

Throw the flag. Blow the whistle. Clock violation (get it? Timing?). It’s too soon to “Just Breathe”. It’s time to hold your breath and jump in! Sure, sure…I know…take your own pulse first in an emergency…remember to breath…I get all that. All well and good, and probably decent advice on its face, but that’s all the grads are ever told. Sure, do all that, but only after you’ve jumped right in to the deep end! You stand on the edge looking at the wide open vista of tomorrow and at some point you have trust that parachute on your back, to yell “GeroniMOOOOOH” and jump.

You can breathe when you land.

I’ll see you next week…

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent.” –Stanley Kubrick

Man is the only species, on Earth at least, that seeks meaning in life. Once food, clothing, and shelter are secured, Man then turns his attention both inward and outward, in the quest for some understanding of why we exist, a quest to make our existence meaningful. Alone among all creatures, we do not subsist (I eat, therefor I am) so much as insist (I think, therefore I am).

The great Religions of the Near East and Near West define a meaningful life in terms of fealty to a deity and His edicts. Further East and meaning is acquired by coming ever closer to enlightenment. New World religions assign meaning to the achievement of harmony among all life forms. But what of the emerging worlds in which the great Religions hold little sway?

Death itself is immutable, and it is death against which all meaning is measured. What came before can be ever and always dismissed as abstract, but what comes after is inextricably tied to what constitutes a meaningful life. Again, Kubrick: “If we can accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death–however mutable man may be able to make them–our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.”

How is this necessarily so? Simply making the statement does not make this a reality, regardless of the fame or following of the author. Why would it be so? Is it because Man as a species can and does sit down to think? If the universe is indeed indifferent and it is Man who introduces meaning, must it not be that our effective universe is man-made? Whether through acts of omission or commission, consequences intended or unintended, it’s hard to escape this conclusion. Herein lies the essential challenge of seeking meaning in life: meaningful for whom?

Adherents to the great Religions are set here. Meaning is parsed by some higher being. For the rest of us an epic societal tug-of-war exists externally. The furthest to one side posits that meaning ends at the tip of a nose, while the other extreme holds that it knows better and will tell you what you should find meaningful; this usually means you doing something for someone else at the behest of the “know-betters”. The truth, at least the actionable truth, lies as always somewhere in between.

Once more, to Kubrick: “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” Herein, I believe, lies the lesson. Meaning, writ small or large, can only be created within. The light of meaning is self-generated, but like all light it can be shared. Must be shared. It is in sharing whatever light we might have or create, however dim we might find it, that makes a meaningful life. What light we create is what separates us from all other life, for Man is alone in his ability to shine that light for others, then see and act upon that which is illuminated.

In the end, the Universe may very well be indifferent, but we need not be. Meaning, in life, may be as simple as the absence of indifference to the Universe.

Every couple or three years comes a slew of articles on friendship, specifically friendships in adults. Thus it is that I find myself returning to the topic for the first time in awhile, having been bombarded of late with articles, books, and movies on the subject (“Of Mice and Men” is being staged on Broadway, for example). That, and my brother’s rather humorous story of having bumped into a fellow Eph with whom I was friendly in college (more on that in a bit). Much has been written on the subject, almost all of it a re-hash except one little gem, a tiny bit of research that suggests that friendship in mid-life is the strongest predictor of longevity of all.

Weird, huh? And not too positive a finding either, what with my oft-told and hard-earned experiences with how difficult it is for men to create new friendships after the age of 30. The magic number is 3. Three close friends predicts a longer life, especially for men. Sadly this usually does NOT include your wife; the overwhelming percentage of wives drifted AWAY from the men in favor of younger women, usually daughters, as they moved through adulthood. As an aside I’m now desperately hoping that Beth will have some room left over from “Lovely Daughter” Megan. (Actually, getting Beth hooked on CrossFit might be my ace in the hole)

Interesting, huh? Three close friends and you live longer. Very few folks had more than 4 or 5, an incredibly tight range when you think about it.

It’s become a kind of psychological dogma that men and women make friends in very different ways. Women, it is said, make friends through the sharing of feelings. In person two women who are friends are said to be most often facing one another, talking. Maintaining this kind of friendship is structurally rather easy in our modern age of communication. Feelings can be shared in any number of ways that do not require the friends to actually be in the same room together. Phone, text, Facebook and Twitter are but a few of the tactical and mechanical advantages to a friendship built on an exchange of feelings, and the currency required for the ongoing investment is simply time.

Men on the other hand make friendship a much more arduous affair. Many women would opine that this could actually describe many, if not most things that men do, but that’s a topic for a different Sunday. The picture most often used to illustrate men in the company of friends has them standing shoulder to shoulder, in the act of sharing an experience but not necessarily sharing any internal reaction to that experience. It makes me chuckle to think that a video of the same scene would probably also look like a portrait, nothing moving, certainly not their lips. For men the basis of friendship is the experience and the fact that both were physically present for it. Whether sitting at a Bulls game in Row J seats 11 and 12 , or working up a sweat at the Loyola Prep gym playing pick-up hoops, the friendship blooms only from the seed of the experience which is fertilized by proximity. At some point the memories of those experiences, stories re-told dozens, hundreds of times, fail to prompt growth in the friendship without the Miracle-Gro of presence. Eventually even shared “experiences by proxy”, raising similar aged children for example, fails to prevent slack from growing in those friendship ties if you aren’t physically there to tighten them.

In my mind the universe is divided into a very few groups of varying sizes. Think of your life as kind of like a bulls-eye floating through a vast space. The center of that bulls-eye comprises that small group of true friends, men and women who would drop everything should you have need, and for whom you would do the same. Friends are people you miss if you haven’t had contact for a matter of days, people whose company you actively seek. These are people you go out of your way to see and never try to avoid. Man or woman, they know how you feel. Again, an aside, happy is the couple who have overlap in this innermost circle of the bulls-eye.

The next circle is filled with friendly acquaintances, people who make you smile. When you have an opportunity to be with them in person or in spirit it makes you happy. There’s no limit on these, and a reasonably friendly character could have dozens of friendly acquaintances scattered throughout a life. This is the group from which most friends are created, and if you are fortunate someone who is no longer really in that bulls-eye drifts no further out from center than this inner ring. Just outside the circle of friendly acquaintances is the ring containing acquaintances, people you’ve met and remember but either don’t ever really spend time with or never have the chance to explore a move toward the center. My brother met a someone who has always been here, the humor in wistful remembrance notwithstanding. Your circles of friends and acquaintances drifts through a vast space filled with folks yet unmet, a (hopefully) few enemies orbiting in there somewhere as well.

We float through the universe in our circles, people drifting in toward the center (perhaps my Brother’s encounter will drive my acquaintance inward) and sadly on occasion out and away. In CrossFit we know both a definition of fitness and a way to measure it. Indeed, Coach Glassman has opined that not only is fitness the most important part of health, but in his opinion it is a precise measurement of the same. He and I disagree around the margins of that position, at least in part because of friendship and what it does for us. We may not be able to define friendship in quite as absolute terms as those we use for fitness, but I’m reasonably sure we all know what it means to be and to have a real friend. Read or watch “Of Mice and Men” if you are unsure. It’s likely that friendship itself, unlike fitness, does not have a precise metric, a measurement of volume or degree. No “friendship across broad time and modal domains” if you will. Though I continue to hold this truth, that you can never have enough friends, there is apparently a number that does have some significance. Three. Three friends, real friends, lead to a longer life. Side by side or face to face, the tipping point is 3.

No amount of time spent or distance traveled is too much for them.

How much space do you have in your heart? We talk in my CrossFit world about work capacity, how much can you move how far or how fast, but today I’m wondering about the capacity to extend your heart to others. Let me tell you a story.

Some 40 years ago a young man was struck by a car and suffered a concussion. While he was hospitalized his mother became ill and died in another hospital. For reasons too complex to share here, the young man’s father was not capable of raising the boy and his older brother so they were taken in by their uncle, the mother’s brother, his wife and 3 kids.

A little extra room in that house, but not really enough. Ditto for money. What they did have enough of it turns out was room in their hearts for two boys suddenly without a family. Room it turns out to treat the nephews as if they were their own children. They sent all 5 children to college, and if memory serves all 5 have graduate degrees. All supported by a couple who found that they had enough room in their hearts to find a way to make enough room everywhere else.

Fast forward 30 years or so from that fateful day in the hospital. The brothers are sitting with the only parents they have (sadly, the father also died long ago), celebrating the first day of school for a son. This family cherished learning, and each year the first day of school for the next generation was a time for all to gather. For whatever reason the aunt and uncle who took the brothers were reflective that morning.  They  said they had but one regret, that they had not formally adopted the boys when they took them in. The boys, now men, had clearly learned the lesson of the untapped capacity in one’s heart. At age 40 and 45 and with the blessings of their cousins, they arranged to be adopted by the uncle and aunt who found room everywhere else when it was clear they already had room in their hearts. A next generation now officially had grandparents.

The announcement for the adoptions were extraordinary. I won’t do the memory justice, but they read something like this: “The Honorable Judge and Mrs. _ wish to announce the arrival of their sons on this very blessed day in 2004. Lawrence M, 5’9″ and 185 pounds and his brother Mark 5’8″ and 185 pounds officially became a part of the ___ family today. Please join us in celebrating our joy.”

Each and every day we learn that our physical boundaries are artificial, self-made restrictions on our capacity. Indeed, the more we expand our physical capacities the more unbounded they seem to become. The lesson in my friend’s story, I’m sure, is that we have a similarly broad and probably untapped capacity in our hearts for love. Like that aunt and uncle, each of us has more room in our hearts than we imagine, just waiting, like our broad fitness capacity, for that time when it is needed.

With that much untapped capacity in our hearts I’m sure that somehow we, like that uncle and aunt so long ago, would find enough room for everything else.