Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the only constant is change; the only thing in life on which you can depend is that things will not always ever be the same. An important corollary to this is that all things, good or bad, will come to an end. So it appears to be in my little slice of the world. While it’s not quite clear exactly when, it is clear that a very important part of my adult life is near an end.

This is the weekend when Beth and I digest the latest iteration of the annual White Family Cape Cod vacation week. For 23 consecutive years all, or almost all, of my family has congregated in the same 2 cottages across the street from the ocean in the idyllic little town of West Dennis, MA. After that comes 12-14 hours of driving home, a rolling debriefing and decompression from a full-immersion experience into my family. For 8 years or so both vacation and the drive home have been fodder for my “Sunday musings”, some of my best. Although some aspects of the vacation were as immutable as Bill Murray waking up in that hotel room every day in Groundhog Day–a seeming violation of my “everything changes” dictum–each year has actually turned out to be a truly unique story told exactly once. For 23 years. It’s really been a remarkable streak when you think about it.

The genesis of this annual odyssey was my youngest sister’s wedding and the addition of a fourth set of in-laws to the family Holiday dynamic. Beth and I are both first borns. We were the first to marry and the first to bring members of the next generation into the family. We have always lived a mutually disagreeable distance from both families, in the backyard of neither, and no closer to either. Both families were equally unhappy with our zip code. Really a compliment, when you think about it.

As part of this it was clear right from the start that there would be no winning and losing when it came to family visits on the big 2 American Holidays Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nope, it was gonna be all War of the Roses, just degrees of losing. My proposed solution? We would declare a summer White Family Holiday and we would all convene in one place for a week together. Thus began 23 years of “The Cape Week.” When we began my caboose, Randy, was 6 weeks old, the 5th of what would become a gaggle of 10 grandchildren, the youngest of whom is now an 8th grader. Somewhere there’s a picture of him dwarfed by a 15 lb. lobster at dinner in year one.

For 23 years we distilled each year’s visits into a single week. We laughed and we cried, whispered and screamed. We loved and not-so-loved over each week as my generation fell into and out of our childhood family roles. It’s kinda like draft slots, right? You sit at the same place at the family dinner table and its even called “Beth’s seat”, or “Darrell’s seat”, or whomever. Whatever your place was in the family (agitator, comforter, achiever, slacker) at some point in the week you fell right into your allotted space. Triumphs and tribulations were tabulated as we offered each other all manner of advice and support. Some of it even solicited! In some years we single-handedly kept the vintners of California solvent with our dinner-time consumption.

So why now? Why is this summer the year that the end is nigh? Ah, it’s that old bugaboo, change. The younger couples and their children were paying attention and they have seen what it takes for the grandchildren to attend as they get older; this has (rightfully) given them pause. It’s hard, very hard, to make a week like this happen every year. As the kids get older, move through their school years and into real life, getting them to the Cape becomes ever more challenging, even when they truly want to be there. More than that, though, is the inexorable change wrought by time in my parents, Gram and Gramp. Soon, much too soon, the trip will either be too much for them to handle, or they’ll not be with us to handle it at all. All things come to an end, after all. Even something as unlikely and wonderful as a family of 20 meeting for a week on the same beach for 23 years.

The lessons are as obvious as they are at once joyous and sad. Good things are worth the effort it takes to keep them alive. My family, led by my brother, will likely try to do just that. Even good things, or the best of things, will eventually succumb to change and perhaps even come to an end. These realizations are bittersweet in our case for they bring along the dread for what this proxy for ultimate change portends. Late one night Mrs. bingo was awakened to the sounds of my muffled sobs as the end appeared before me. This year? Next? Change is the only constant. Everything comes to an end.

As I turned to leave, not knowing if I would ever return, I bent down to kiss my beloved beach goodbye.

Will you make any New Year’s resolutions this week? I probably will. Each year my list becomes smaller, but I am more successful in hitting the mark. Why? Probably because the list is small and therefore better thought out for one.

The other reason is “resolve”, the characteristic most necessary to achieving success in your resolutions. It’s a fancy word for commitment, or more precisely the conscious act of making and following through on that commitment. It’s infinitely easier to find  the resolve necessary to follow through on my resolutions if there are fewer of them for sure, but having taken a bit more time in coming up with them in the first place it also seems that my resolutions of late have been a bit more meaningful, too. Investing the time in the search for a meaningful resolution seems to reduce the time and effort it takes me to muster up the resolve necessary to see one through.

If you celebrate Christmas (or Hanukah for that matter) you probably did a bit of gift giving recently. Sure, some of it probably felt kinda like an obligation, but at least a bit of that gift giving was really more about the expression of love behind the gift. That’s the easy part, at least for me, expressing love. Whether on the gifting side or the giving side, once I gave myself permission to freely express love it really became pretty easy. Took a while to learn how to do it for sure, but with practice it became a natural thing, almost a default setting.  It was fun, too!

The receiving end of the gift thing is a lot of fun, too, of course. I mean–come on–who doesn’t like opening up gifts?! Lots of funny stuff around getting a gift, too. Think of all the funny “re-gifting” stories you have, or the last “White Elephant” party you attended. In the White house the philosophy of “it’s OK to say you probably won’t use that gift” became “REJECT THAT GIFT”! That got to be quite funny as we all tried to one-up each other in the outlandish ways we declined the gifts. Beth is still scarred from her first encounter, and she’s never had a single gift rejected!

Accepting a gift is really rather easy, it’s accepting the love behind the gift, accepting another’s love that’s a little more complex. Maybe you didn’t know how much they loved you. Maybe you are worried it’s conditional, the love, with strings attached. More often, though, the problem is that you aren’t really sure HOW to accept the love, or even if you are deserving of such a thing. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s really what you’re thinking. “They can’t possibly love me, love me that much. If they only knew the truth.” Or something like that.

Here’s the truth: they really DO know. And because of that they really, actually, truly DO love you. Most importantly there’s not even a little bit of a mistake here, and more than likely there’s not even the tiniest thread of a string attached. Not only are you loved, not only has someone in some way told you that, you deserve every little bit of that love. Really and truly. Resolve this year to believe that. Make your 2014 New Year’s Resolution to be openly thankful for that love, just like you are for that beautifully gift-wrapped present under the tree at Christmas, the one you would never reject.

Resolve to let yourself  be loved this year.

Happy New Year!

You can’t do a search for “CrossFit” without wading through countless articles about CrossFit “injuries” and whether CrossFit is safe, or how to do CrossFit safely. Heck, half of my “Zite” CrossFit section is polluted with that genre. The CrossFit community itself is awash in comments and stories of folks who are over-worked. Rashes of niddling little injuries pile one upon another until the recipe brews up not a finely tuned soufflé but rather something more like the cheesy crust rimming the pan that contains the remnants of over-baked mac n’cheese.

How can this possibly be? We watch our Games athletes in this run-up season to our Games, parse their programs and compare their 3-a-days to our 3-a-weeks, and yet it is we who fall apart, not them. We marvel at the Princes and Princesses of our kingdom like the wondrous Christmas above, see them parachute into view leaving behind shock and awe, only to find ourselves reading about this or that danger or catastrophe or calamity from an “over-trained” CrossFitter. How come?

It’s simple, really, and that’s probably why it’s so hard. The sensational stories about danger? Meh, nothing more than tabloid folderal, no more common in reality than teenage vampires in bikinis on page 3 of some magazine at CVS. Oh sure, they both exist, but the noise made about their existence is laughably out of proportion to their true numbers.

No, the real reason we as a group struggle with this is that we forget a couple of really fundamental things about CrossFit, the fitness and health program. The WODs here on CrossFit.com are openly described as created to challenge the fittest athletes on earth. Period. Sorry, but that’s not you, and that’s not me. If we do these as Rx’d and as scheduled the vast majority of us will have a “wheels come off” experience, either a little at a time or in one spectacular crash.

Again, why? Well, because of the other CrossFit fundamental that we all too frequently forget: OUR CrossFit is a training program to allow us to be fitter, healthier, and therefore better at LIFE. Christmas, Jason, Rich, Julie et al are our equivalents of Andy Murray (now playing in the Wimbledon Finals) or Danica Patrick (driving a car and turning left this afternoon): they are paid in part to excel at CrossFit. Each day is carefully planned and includes a healthy dose of rest and recovery.

Ah, there it is. Rest and recovery. Not only that but carefully planned rest and recovery. You talk to your Coach about loads and time domains but when’s the last time you sat down and talked with your trainer about your schedule? Have you EVER discussed recovery? Whether you work out in a Box or on your own, do you have an injury prevention plan? Think about it. If we are doing Crossfit in order to be better at something…anything…whenever we have some sort of Crossfit malady that decreases our functionality we’ve achieved the exact opposite of our goals. Maybe we can’t go to work. Even worse, maybe we can’t go to the Box. CrossFit is FUN and the gym is FUN; not being able to go to the gym stinks.

Here’s my bid: pushing ourselves to our limit 3 days on/1 day off is part of who we are, and we should continue to do just that. Go ahead and take a full dose of the CrossFit prescription. Be inspired by Christmas and her peers and occasionally give in to the temptation to do something extraordinary like “CrossFit for Hope” as Rx’d. Or really crazy, like “Eva”!

At the same time follow their example and consciously build recovery into your own CrossFit program. Can’t fit 10 hours of sleep into your 24 hour day like Jason? No time or money for a couple of massages and the chiropractor every week? Me either. My day job really messes up my CrossFit, ya know? I can’t remember the last time I took a nap. So go hard when you workout, but schedule in breaks. Make them mandatory. Allow those little aches and pains that prove that you are, indeed, working hard to heal before they become an unstoppable cascade of real injury. (Do a search on the Message Board for “Larry Lindenman” and “rest”, “scheduled rest”, or “de-load”). Accept that you may need to make tiny compromises in order to prevent injuries. For example, if you can’t afford to have your hands rip from pull-ups, do whatever it takes to prevent them regardless of the sniping you may encounter here or elsewhere about gloves, wraps, or tape.

There are three fundamental aspects of CrossFit: business, sport, and fitness. The few and fortunate among us who participate at the highest levels of the first two often have the luxury of fewer non-CF priorities and can apply laser-like focus on training, including recovery. You and I, on the other hand, must remember that CrossFit is a tool, the best tool, that we use to make ourselves better. Like all powerful tools it must be accorded respect.

We must plan our recovery lest we recover from our wreck.

It’s the end of November. In the United States we are just finishing the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the purest of our national holidays in all respects. We are entering what is euphemistically known as the “Holiday Season”, a time once used to commemorate the intersection of family and faith, now b@stardized into a commercial org@$mic frenzy. Hidden in there, somewhere, alive against all odds, lie the rituals that bind us together, bind us to some version of our past.

Rituals are different from habits. Habits are trainable, repeatable, common activities we engage consistently in the hopes of some equally consistent, common outcome. They are largely personal and exist in a tiny personal domain. No, rituals are a shared endeavor, and choice is not always a part of the program.

We call these rituals by many names; in the extended White family they are traditions. We are a family that craves such things. Do it once it’s a precedent. Do it next year and it’s a tradition. Do it yet again and however it went is now inviolate ritual. Is this good?

Some rituals are gentle, almost whimsical. They tickle us and we smile little smiles as they come and go. Others are grand, some so outsized that “grandiose” is the only apt descriptor. There is weight to these, demands that must be met, plans that must be made. Some of this weight is real, usually born of history that stretches generations into the past. Some are even pleasant.

The power of ritual to teach and to bind is part of why they persist. The power of a ritual to resist a changing world, whether macro or micro, speaks to the inherent and personal resonance of that ritual. The more internal the effect, the greater the power.The longer lived the ritual, the more resistant it is to a changing world.

Church. The family meal. Travel. Gifting. All of the trappings that surround each. Why do we do what we do, especially at this time of year? Do our rituals remind us of a history that is warm, a legacy that bears propagating? Do they teach a next generation in a way that leads us to look forward with eager anticipation? Even painful rituals such as Yom Kippur end with optimism.

Do they rather simply reinforce some something that should have faded away, been allowed to die? Something that stands in the way of a better today or tomorrow, yesterday as the anchor that drags against full sails and a bright horizon? These we should have the courage to leave behind.

‘Tis the season in which most of us face the longest-lived, most deeply entrenched rituals in our lives. Most of them are likely that way because they bind us to a warm past, teach us, re-fuel and inspire us. Whether writ large or small, these are what we should return to as we face the bombardment of a world a’changing.