Sunday musings 4/29/12
Sunday musings…
1) Sun. In the sky. In Cleveland. Honest.
2) Paleo fridge. It’s empty. Seriously, how much can one young man eat when his folks are doing the picking, digging, and killin’?
3) Winston Churchill 1. “Mr. Churchill is easily satisfied with the best.” My kinda guy.
4) Winston Churchill 2. “He loved beautiful and intelligent women.” Since leaving college I have been surrounded by women. My med school class was the first in the U.S. to have more women than men, for example. The medical/industrial complex employs mostly women, and both my office and my OR experiences occur largely in the company of women.
I love women! This has made my professional life more fun, I think. I love women, and my experiences with them have taught me that I should expect to have my expectations exceeded. It’s much the same around here, chez CrossFit. Did you take a look at the performances by the women, individual and team, at the Regionals yesterday?
People can be funny about men and women being friends, hanging together at work or at play. It’s a bummer because one can never have enough friends, and not allowing for friendships with members of the opposite gender decreases your potential pool of candidates by 50%. Churchill was known to have a lot of close friendships with beautiful and intelligent women, friendships that were just that and nothing more.
Again, my kinda guy.
5) Duration. Life is long. I’ve been saying this for a while now. Life is only short if you are unlucky. More often’s the case that your life is very hard and it’s STILL long.
How often have you heard the term “long and slow wins the race”? I’m becoming skeptical about this one as well. It seems to me that the average speed of the winning racer is, indeed, rather slow. But if you watch the race itself you notice that the most successful “racers” are actually doing serial sprints. Picking their spots and turning it on. Knowing when it’s “Go Time” and being able to floor it seems to be the best strategy in the long-life race.
If life is long we need to re-interpret some of our other strategies as well. “Carpe Diem”, live for the day, becomes somewhat more complex if we anticipate that we will live another, and another, and on and on. We typically view “Carpe Diem” through the prism of the classic thought experiment, the “get hit by a bus” scenario. As in: “If I get hit by a bus tomorrow would I be pleased with all I’ve done thus far, with what I did today?” In any life, long or short, this line of thought has merit; one should strive to max out each day, wring the most life out of every single one.
A long life prompts one to rise up and view a life not from 3 feet but from 3,000 or 30,000 feet as well. What happens if I DON’T get hit by a bus? If I look at the path I am now on, the trends I have established with the decisions and actions I have taken thus far, is what I am doing and where I seem to be going likely to create a life I will look back upon with pride and with a smile if I DON’T get hit by that bus?
The reality is that you are driving the bus, pedal to the medal at times and just cruising at others, carrying as your passengers the friends who get on and off over the long life. It may be more important to avoid hitting someone else with bus you are driving than it is to worry about being hit by a bus yourself.
For the duration of the trip, however long.
I’ll see you next week…
Posted by bingo at April 29, 2012 7:11 AM
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2012 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Crossfit, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.