Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Date. Happy Birthday to the founder of CrossFit. Many more to come.

2) Secular tailwind. Heard on MSNBC. What does that even mean? How can people rag on medical people for using medical terms when BS like this is spoken? At least my stuff means something.

3) Gym sign. “Tired of being Fat and Ugly? Just be Ugly; Come to the Gym.”

That there’s pretty good.

4) Failure. “There are no failures, only feedback.” (Unknown). I like that, pretty much exactly as stated. I’ve written before that in order to learn, to progress, to succeed, it’s probably NECESSARY to fail as long as the failure is examined and parsed for the lessons to be learned. The quote is inaccurate and loses its essential truth if one encounters failure and simply walks away from it, leaves it behind.

Examining a failure in oder to obtain feedback that will prepare you for the next attempt allows you to experience the ultimate way to fail: Fail UP.

5) Practice. I read about a couple of athletes who do the same thing in their training: they practice winning. That’s right, each training session they do something they are good at and make sure they succeed in order to get accustomed to winning, to make winning feel normal. A decathlete, a golfer, and a basketball player I think it was.

Makes sense, I think. Visualize all of the first-time winners you’ve ever watched in any type of event. The biggest opponent they faced as the match wound down was sitting right between their own ears. Doubt, fear, a palpable sense of “what am I doing here” born of being in the foreign territory out front, bourn like a yoke attached to a freight car filled with anxiety.

I’m quite sure there are dozens of ways we can do this in our CrossFit world as we do our WOD, whether we do them simply for the fitness benefit of do them on the fields of competition. I also know that we learn how to win, to defeat our fear, our weakness, our natural tendency to turn away from the difficult and the uncomfortable simply by doing CrossFit.

That, in and of itself, is a little exercise in the practicing of winning that carries over into the game of life.

6) Random. You know where this one’s going. Another random act of heinous, senseless violence just occurred, only not the one you are thinking of. I just got home from several hours at a local hospital ER caring for the victim (1 of 3) of a random beating outside a bar last night in Cleveland. While they will live, this vicious, ugly act will cost this person the use of an eye.

How should we, as individuals and as a society, respond to last night in Cleveland and Friday night in Colorado? The larger societal question is almost certainly bigger than we can handle here, and I’m pretty sure it’s bigger than something a tiny voice like mine might answer. But I think we can tackle the question of how we can or should respond on a personal level, as an individual.

We should live today and tomorrow and the next day just as we lived last week and last month and last year.

For these acts are the doings of madmen, of people who have somehow lost that part of themselves that makes them fully human. We are empathetic creatures on both a micro level (I gaze down upon my patient on the ER gurney) and macro (we shrink in horror at the story on the front page). Those who have committed these acts do not look upon their victims and see the same thing that you and I see; they do not look upon another being with whom they share vastly more then the total of any paltry differences and see a version of themselves, another person. How could they? How could they see another person and still do what they’ve done? By disregarding the humanity of their victims they relinquish their own. We gaze upon them, or we should, with little more than that which we would summon as we looked at any animal that savaged a person.

We react to these random tragedies by going about our daily business, going to work, to a ballgame, to a movie just as we would have done last week. We maintain, and should always maintain, a situational awareness of our surroundings, but we defeat these madmen by not letting them make us afraid. If they change us at all we win by becoming more open, more friendly, more generous. We who remain become serial perpetrators of an entirely different type of random behavior: Random acts of kindness.

And we win.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at July 22, 2012 7:49 AM