Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Tuna. I learned how to climb a rope. Did real, live rope climbs for the first time in a WOD yesterday during “31 Heroes”. Ton of fun. Both “The Heir” and Lil’bingo had done them before and used different techniques, so the WOD was preceded by a skills class taught by the boys. More fun.

What else did I learn? Well, you can scale a rope, but there’s no way a rope climb can be scaled.

2) Expiration date. Doctor to cancer patient: “Well, I looked really hard, but I didn’t find an expiration date stamped on your foot.” Lotta meat on that bone.

Remember sometime as a kid sitting around with your buddies and playing the “if you could know the exact day you would die, would you want to” game? Remember how you answered and why? I always said “no”, partly because of the fun of the mystery of tomorrow (we never knew the gender of our children in utero, either), and partly due to a fear that I would in some way cease to be whatever and whoever I was supposed to become were I to know when I would cease becoming.

I read a silly, stupid blog post on some random fitness site (my Zite magazine offers up such nuggets occasionally) which basically said that CrossFit was OK for folks over-50 as long as you didn’t work too hard. Seriously. No mention of form -> consistency -> Intensity. It’s as if they’d stamped an expiration date on not only CrossFit’s efficacy but also all of us north of 50.

I call BS.

Our childhood parlor game notwithstanding, we move through our lives unaware of our own, personal expiration dates. Because of this we can seek a tomorrow that’s just a tiny bit better than today, physically and otherwise. But you already know that, don’t you?

3) Life coach. Clan bingo is soon to say our goodbyes to one of our dogs. Haddie, our 14 yo English Setter, the “Nanna” to my “Darlings”, is failing. She is still mostly happy and pain-free, her incontinence and insomnia posing more of a challenge for us than for her until this week. But this past week’s been tough for her, and the inescapable end is near. Dinner tonight with all assembled will be hard as we contemplate the next step. I pray for a missed wake-up call, or a long sigh as she is cuddled one last time, but…

Pets, especially dogs, are marvelous life coaches, don’t you think? They give unconditional love to their human pack, and give it from a well so deep it is essentially bottomless. They expect little, and live their lives fully in the moment at hand. Can’t you just hear it in their minds? “Breakfast? Really? That’s so cool! How did you know I was hungry?!” Their trust is implicit and nearly boundless.

I’ve always been amazed by the emotional intuition of my dogs. They seem to have a kind of emotional ESP, too, aware of what’s coming before you even get out of the car. When someone is edgy or angry the dogs are nowhere to be found–no reason to become collateral damage if you didn’t cause the problem. Show up a little bummed out, though, and there they are, velcro’d to your leg, ready to draw away your sadness with each stroke of their fur.

Yup, dogs are pretty good life coaches like that, but they also serve to teach us, to prepare us, for life’s ultimate events. We didn’t do this, but how many of you “practiced” on your dogs before you had your kids? They do need to be fed when they’rre hungry, you don’t change their diapers, but you’d better get them outside when they need to go. And with any dog that can stand up or jump there’s a fair amount of “child-proofing” necessary, isn’t there?

Since we outlive them, our dogs also prepare us for our greatest loss, the loss of loved ones. We bond with our dogs. We bathe in their love as we shower them with ours, and in return they teach us our hardest lesson: how to say goodbye.

I don’t know how I’ll be able to do it; I can’t even see my screen through the tears right now. Who, after all, is ever really ready when the expiration date actually arrives? But I’m a good student, and Haddie’s been a good teacher. We’ve had two bonus years with our dog after her stroke, and this, too, has been a learning experience. I’ve learned to be more thankful.

I’m gonna miss my dog. Thank you, Haddie.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at August 28, 2011 6:18 AM

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2011 at 8:20 am 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.