Posts Tagged ‘chesterton’
Sunday musings 11/9/14
Sunday musings…
1) Barbara. I have a love/hate relationship with “Fran”. I just hate “Barbara”.
2) WiFi. At this very moment I am hurtling along I-71, riding shotgun as Mrs. bingo drives us home after our visit with “The Heir” and his Princess. I’m musing.
This tech stuff is pretty cool, eh?
3) Big Data. Many years ago now a CrossFitter from VT sent me a note and asked me to look at a little project he was working on. Guy named Bill. That little project turned into what we all now know as “Beyond the Whiteboard.” They’ve just put out the first results of studying the data so many of us put in. Turns out that to achieve a particular degree of improvement in fitness you get there faster if you work out more frequently, though you do get there even with a program that includes fewer workouts each week (at least when evaluating As Rx’d results from CrossFit.com WODs).
It’s cool on its face that we learn a) this stuff works and b) if works faster if you do it a bit more frequently. No question. Looking at it from 30,000 feet rather than 300, this is the first real instance of formal data collection on a mass level that has looked at a measure of fitness with stated objective parameters and controls. This is cool. It is also an affirmation of the most basic premises put forth early on by Coach as he launched this phenomenon.
Good on ya, Bill.
4) Inconvenience. “Inconvenience is only adventure wrongly considered.” C.K. Chesterton (1908). Promised you I’d return to this.
This is all about attitude, and to some degree I guess it’s about expectations. You could just as easily substitute “boredom” for inconvenience; Mrs. bingo has oft said “boredom is a choice”, which I think fits here, too. There’s a tiny, or maybe not so tiny, aspect of entitlement in both inconvenience and boredom, don’t you think, if you are one to take a more critical view of these states of mind or being.
Chesterton is more than a bit more positive in his approach. Take for example the inconvenience of being forced to spend a night in your layover city because a flight has been canceled. Monkey wrench city, that one. Just happened to my brother-in-law, Pete. Not a one among us prepares for that, and I’d venture to say that an equal number of us views that scenario as something positive or something to look forward to. Pete was not amused.
My bet is that Chesterton would take a different tack in similar straights. Perhaps he would do what Mrs. bingo and I once did, staying in the airport and enjoying a 2 hour meal at a minor miracle of fine dining found in a corner of the terminal. All of a sudden you are presented with 8, 10, 24 hours of opportunity that you have no choice but to exploit. Inconvenient in this day of internet in an auto, schedules as tight as a post-dinner belt? You bet. But when would you have checked out the Liberty Bell in Philly, or the Museum of Natural History in NYC? Heck, if you brought your Nano’s you are probably only a short cab ride from visiting a Box.
You could even choose to luxuriate in being bored.
I’ll see you next week…
Posted by bingo at November 9, 2014 8:05 AM
Sunday musings 10/19/14
Sunday musings…
1) Inconvenience. “Inconvenience is only adventure wrongly considered.” C.K. Chesterton (1908).
I’m gonna chew on this and visit it next week. This is really good.
2) Wedding. It’s wedding season 2.0 for Clan bingo. Our progeny and their friends are in full wedding mode. We seem to be on the 2/month plan.
v2.0 is quite a little pricier than v1.0.
3) Patent. Jonas Salk would be 100 this weekend.
With all of the hysteria about Ebola it’s worth noting that literally hundreds of thousands of children were either killed or crippled every single year in the U.S. from Polio before the Salk vaccine was developed and widely disseminated. >300,000 children were killed by Smallpox each year. Last year some 56,000 Americans died from the Flu. Every single one of these has been, or could be avoided through the use of a vaccine. All of them trace back in some way to Salk.
When asked who owned the patent on his vaccine Salk was said to have answered thusly: “Well, I guess the people, I would say. There is no patent.
Could you patent the sun?”
3) Short sale. Lots of meanings for this, especially with the whole real estate bust thing. Kinda scary words at any time, but all the more frightening when we hear that the big gov-backed mortgage giants will once again loosen their lending standards, arguably the initial step that built up our housing bubble in the first place.
As usual, though, the obvious leap is not the one I’m interested in today. The more frightening short sale is one in which you sell YOURSELF short. Settle for something that is not good for you, or not really good enough, because you think what you have is somehow all you deserve. That’s terrifying, and I’m calling you out, right now.
Why are you still in that job that makes you shudder at the very thought of waking up on a work day? That boyfriend or girlfriend who is always dragging you down, telling you you’re not good enough without them, or holding you back because they can’t handle your success? Tell me, why are they still in the picture? Seriously, you’re gonna have to help me out on this one because I just don’t get those kinds of decisions. Defaulting to the status quo only makes sense when the status quo is pretty darned good.
This is not about selling yourself, this is about assigning worth. I’ve talked a bit about this before but I was reminded of it this weekend when I met a young woman who can reasonably be described as “the whole package”, and yet she seems to have tied herself to someone who wishes to hold her back, just as the anchor holds the speed boat at bay. She is selling herself short into what should be a booming market for who she is and could be. She, you, all of us are worth so much more.
Don’t sell yourself short.
I’ll see you next week…