Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) End of Watch. Whoa.

2) Barriers? “Brick walls are put in front of us to help us learn how much we want something.” Randy Pausch.

3) Serendipity. Meet new people without having an agenda. You don’t need to “accomplish” something with each new person you meet. It’s not a waste of time if every now and again you just, you know, meet.

Be open to wonder. Be open to being surprised.

4) Pride. “Pride goeth before the fall.” Hubris. “Check your ego at the door.” Yup. Sure. All true.

But so is pride as in “proud.” It’s OK to be proud of the accomplishments one makes. In the Box or your garage as you complete some horribly difficult WOD, or indeed elsewhere in your life.

And it’s much more than OK to be proud of other’s accomplishments. Out loud.

5) Small world. CrossFit continues to shrink the world, at least for CrossFitters. The big things, the grand themes are really obvious. Today we hear more about the CrossFit Kenya initiative. Admit it, you had some inkling of the Third World poverty and privations in Kenya, and you probably had a sense that both were worse for kids. The distance between you and a village in Kenya just shrunk, didn’t it?

It’s OK if you don’t have room in any of your “spaces” for the Kenya initiative, Hope for Kenya, but if you had a little spare room in your life to help out in some way, that village in Kenya seems more like it’s, I dunno, a couple states over rather than 4 flights and a Land Rover away. That’s the big way CrossFit is making it a small world.

CrossFit shrinks your own everyday world, too. How many times have you worn a CrossFit shirt or hoodie and met a fellow CrossFitter? Or had someone who was curious just strike up a conversation? There is an enormous distance between people as they traverse their day-to-day, a distance measured by the silence we maintain, the way we avoid interaction.

A tee shirt with “CrossFit” on it sure shrinks that, too, doesn’t it…

6) Ownership. Who owns your past? Well, obviously you own your past, whether you own up to it or not. But who owns the documentation of your past? The proof, the provenance?

“It’s a funny thing, people trying to sell you back bits of your own past.” This is how a musician described the experience of being offered for sale tapes from performances long ago. They had little value to anyone other than the musician. There’s a certain lack of grace, a type of ethical poverty in such a seller. but I digress…

The physical proof of our past used to be just that: physical. Tapes, photos, negatives. A panting. Notes or a diary. You could touch it, touch your past. You could also end it, at least the provenance. A tiny fire, a trip to the landfill, and ‘poof’, it’s gone. No issue about ownership when there’s nothing there to own, except of course ownership of the ephemeral, the memories.

It’s a rather quaint story in this day of immortal electronic memory, isn’t it? A box of reel-to-reel memories for sale, a physical totem to tag you in a life past.

Posted by bingo at January 27, 2013 6:33 AM