Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Timing. Yup, this was gonna be done around 0830. Not.

2) Small world. Amazing how the world has shrunken, eh? What with all of our communication technology. I kept track of my friends Greg and Jeff as they traipsed through Europe and Africa last week. Did it from Cleveland with a little help from them, their travel mates, and this little thingy called the internet.

Funny, when I was a young man my siblings and I would communicate while on the road by calling Grambingo and leaving messages with her for each other.

Small world.

3) CrossFit Games. Like most good things the CrossFit Games are a double-edged sword if you are committed to CrossFit the “life Rx”. I find that I have had to work up an entirely different “elevator talk” in the last 12 months as more and more people have been introduced to CF through the Games coverage. I think this is what it would be like if the initial exposure to skiing for 90+% of people was watching Skier-Cross on ESPN 2, ya know?

4) Positive. Great quote floating out there about nutrition: “it’s harder to eat the right way if you are always concentrating on what you CAN’T eat. It’s easier, and probably more fun, to concentrate on what you CAN eat.” Love that. You can apply that to all kinds of stuff, not only in nutrition or fitness but pretty much everywhere in life.

5) Accountable. Heavy, heavy word that, accountable. For what are you accountable? To whom are you accountable? What’s the difference? Many’s the time when the answer to a difficult, complex question can be discovered by framing it in terms of accountability. A great example is “Accountable Care Organizations” in healthcare reform: What can we expect from them? Well, to whom are they accountable and for what?

We are accountable for our actions. More specifically, we are accountable for the effects of our actions not only on ourselves but also on others. At some point in time we are always “held to account.” The law of unintended consequences does not give us a pass if things don’t turn out as expected, nor are we less accountable if the reaction is not what we had planned when we acted (or failed to act).

To whom we might be accountable is both simple and quite complex. It is complex because there are instances when others will elect themselves as the arbiters of our actions with or without our consent or our knowledge. Kinda hard to expand on this one because this type of oversight can be rather, you know, arbitrary.

We can keep this part simple, I think: we are accountable to those who we see and touch, people who hear us or see us. Our family. People with whom we live. Co-workers. Customers and clients. The lady sitting next to you on the bus or the guy in the pick-up truck you just passed on the 5.

In the end though, accountability starts (and probably ends) with you. Have you thought about how your actions are playing out? Are you content with those results? You are first and foremost accountable to yourself for your actions. If you can’t be comfortable with them how can you expect anyone else to be? The first and last person to hold you to account should be you.

Remember, this small world is changed by your actions; no part of the world is changed more than its smallest part.

You.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at June 3, 2012 11:43 AM