Category Archives: Health

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Retirement, Third Phase

Kick the Bucket List. Live As A Eudaimoniac.

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Friend Tom Crane was talking about how the bucket list might be different.  “Imagine if your bucket list was things like looking in the eye and telling everyone you cared about that you loved them deeply and had for a long time.”

In my view you better have your bucket list imprinted in the daily way of things or it means little.  Why save up to the end things you can do today?

A bucket list is a close relative of the finish line model of retirement.  Wait until you no longer have work dragging you down, then do all the fun stuff.  Bucket list.  Wait until you know you’re going to die, then do all the fun stuff you didn’t have the courage to do before.

Tom’s idea is better.  Let’s consider those things that would make our life and the lives of those around us more rich, more peaceful, more fruitful.  Then, do them.

This, by the way, is the guiding notion of eudaimonia.  Here’s a repeat passage from a post last summer:

Composed of two Greek worlds, eu (good) and daimon (spirit) Aristotle and the Stoics after him promoted it as the end of human life. As such it has often been translated as happiness or welfare, but perhaps a better phrase is human flourishing.  Or, without getting fancy, why not good spirit?  Both have an active turn, taking us toward enrichment, fullness, striving within a humane ambit.

Now there you have an internal state worth cultivating.  It’s the difference between a noun and a gerund.

 

Health

You Can’t Take It For Granted

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Imbolc                                                           Valentine Moon

This quote is from a Star-Tribune article about Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s recent death from an apparent heroin overdose:

“You can’t take your sobriety for granted,” said Dr. Marvin Seppala, chief medical officer at Hazelden. “This is a lifelong illness. People have got to stay wary for the rest of their lives.”

From the outside this seems like it shouldn’t be true.  You get sobriety under your belt, you have experience and knowledge, why should you get into trouble?  Because the thing that alcoholics do normally is drink.  The thing heroin users do normally is use.  Not to use, once you’ve passed over into addiction, is the abnormal condition.  That means that sobriety is a lifelong commitment to an abnormal standard.

It can be done.  I’ve done it.  So far.  At times, the farther away from 1976 that I get, a thought wanders through: is it really true?  That’s a slippery thought and treatment teaches us to stay out of slippery places.  But the point is that it has to be countered even now, 38 years sober.

 

Health
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Yoga.  This will take a while to get.  Difficult for me, co-ordinating the various moves and it requires stamina and strength as well as flexibility.  I probably have the most to gain in yoga of all the work P90X has to offer.  Which means, of course, that I’m starting the farthest from where I want to be.

A few poses here.  It will require real work to do them well.

Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Doing Stuff

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

I have a ways to go before I get up to 7 or 8 verses in an hour.  There’s still too much to learn, too often.  This is not a bad thing, just the way it is.  But I’m pushing myself, trying to get faster and more accurate at the same time.

P90X will be the same.  Right now I’m having to hit the pause button a lot.  The various exercise require precise movements and I’m not exactly quick at picking them up.  Even when I get the form right, I have to monitor myself.  Today, in the shoulder and back workout, there were a lot of moves I had never seen:  Congdon curls, for example.  Still, as with the first resistance day, I found this much easier than the plyometrics.  Much.

Tomorrow is yoga.  Right now all these exercises are new and that makes the sessions take longer.  That will pass; the sequence uses twelve different workouts so the repetition’s a bit slower than I would like.  Still, I’ll get there.

Tomorrow Missing shows up on the computer screen.  Looking at Bob’s work, making decisions.  Just as soon as I get it finished, it starts going out.

Health

Plyo, Oh Myo

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Winter                                                         Seed Catalog Moon

 

On Saturday afternoon the P90X program kicked into plyometrics.  This involves jumping, twisting, turning, lunging.  The chest and back resistance work of the day before went ok.  It was a challenge, sure, but I expected that.  Wanted it, in fact.

Plyometrics on the other hand.  To use buddy Frank Broderick’s favorite epithet, “It kicked my ass.”  These workouts are 60 minutes long with little downtime.  I made it through the full 60 with the resistance work, but the plyo?  30.  I. Couldn’t.  Do.  Anymore.  That will change over the next few weeks.

Tony, that’s Tony Horton as I mentioned before, says you can get 8 pack abs.  8?  I can’t find any.  Always thought the highest you could go was 6.  Sounds like he’s setting me up to fail. Doncha think?

Variety is important in workouts and this is a great change from my previous routines.  It’s cold outside, but I’ll be warm in just a few minutes.

 

Health

Muscle Confusion

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Started a new exercise program, P90X.  The X stands for xtreme and the dialogue of personal trainer Tony Horton is just that.  Xtreme in a weird way.  Self-congratulatory and self-denigrating.  A jarring mixture.

(That’s Tony in panels 1 and 3)

That aside, I believe this program will energize my workouts which had gotten stale.  P90X is a 90 day package of alternating resistance and cardio workouts, each one taking around an hour.  The first one, chest and back, which was tonight pushed me, but in a good way.  Tony’s big thing (yes, Tony and I are on a first name basis already) is muscle confusion.  That is, he works muscle groups from several different angles.

It is true that repetitive workouts begin to lose their punch because your body adapts to them and doesn’t work as hard.  I want to avoid muscle loss associated with aging, to get stronger so that the outdoor work I do is less tiring, and to give myself the advantage that regular, intense exercise has to offer.  I’ve been doing the first and the last with a self-designed program, but I wasn’t progressing.  We’ll see if this program will produce different results.

Health, Latin, Tea, Writing

A Warm World

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Winter                                                                   Winter Moon

Those words, Winter/Winter Moon, above the posts signal the cozy world I inhabit right now.  It gets cold and snowy outside.  I turn on the green gas stove, sit down at my computer and find out what Ovid meant or what it is I will mean when I write Loki’s children.  My yixing teapots fill up and drain, infusion after infusion, Yunnan White Needle or Master Han’s Looseleaf Pu’er. One clear and flavorful, the other dark and rich.

(pu’er tea)

The light fades and I prepare to workout, that 45 minute to an hour moment of very physical activity.  I enjoy it, miss it when I don’t do it, but all the same I wish I didn’t need to do it.

After that there’s supper, some TV or a book, or both, with Kate, then later bedtime.  Over night the study cools down and the next morning I get up and turn on the green gas stove. It’s winter, cold and snowy outside.

Health

Learning From Pain

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Samhain                                                                     Winter Moon

Being an autodidact has its privileges.  No one interferes.  This is a big one to me.  Being an autodidact has its disadvantages.  No one tells you when you err.  Error becomes obvious in another way.

Take exercise for example.  When shifting to new routines, you have to coach yourself. The internet helps with videos, but there’s deterioration between seeing the video and actually doing it.  Mighta been those wide grip lat pull downs or the back extensions on the exercise ball.  Not sure.

But, when added to felling a couple of trees in below zero weather, the old back began to teach a lesson in something or other.  Not sure quite what yet, but I’ll be working on it over the next few days.   Absorbing lessons is part of the autodidact experience.

Glad I have Greg for the Latin.

Family, Health

Monday, Monday

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Samhain                                                           Winter Moon

It’s so cold ice doesn’t work on our highways and streets.  It has to be 10 above at least and we’re not predicted to reach that mark until Saturday.

Finished designing a new workout schedule.  You have to mix it up once in a while otherwise a rut.  Going back to a lighter workout on Tuesday and Thursday, some cardio and core and sticking with the high intensity cardio on Monday, Wednesday, Friday.  That’s when I do the regular resistance work, in between high intensity bursts lasting around 2 minutes in the anaerobic range.

Kate and I are going into St. Paul to see a financial advisor.  We see her 2 to 3 times a year. She helps us keep our cash flow working.  Ruth dug us out of a big hole about 10 years ago and we’ve flourished since then.  She’s a great reality check.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Holidays

Be Glad You Exist

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Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

Thankful.  Grateful.  Still here.

Yes, that’s the  prerequisite to all that follows, my living presence to write these words. And, yes, damn it, I’m grateful to be alive.

When I visited Constanta, Romania a year and a half ago, I went there as a pilgrimage to the place of Ovid’s exile.  This is a city that has Roman (Romania!) roots.  Outside an excellent museum of Roman and Greek antiquities (it was a Greek trading port first.), there was a collection of grave markers.  On one of them was this line:  Be Glad You Exist.  That’s what I would call ur-gratitude.  Thankfulness for living.

It’s where I’ll start.  Beyond consciousness and good health in my own case I’m thankful for the same in Kate, the dogs, family, friends and even a few others.  Our home.  Our buddies and colleagues the bees, the soil and the plants which grow in it, those past and those to come.  The orchard and the trees in our woods.  All the critters, sleeping and active that call it home.

Extending all that in a generally cosmic direction, I am grateful for the physics that allow us to exist at all, the sun for its energy, the planet for its hospitable climate (sorry about that hot pack, Gaia) and the North American continent for its wildness and its cities and towns.  Yes, the suburbs, too.  Even Andover.

Language.  English.  Being able to communicate with each other, even through such a flawed and miraculous medium.  What would life be without language?  Western medicine.  Often maligned, but my fav.  Western civilization.  Also often maligned, but mine and yours.  At least most of you who read this.  And just as worthy a human artifice as anyone else’s.

Of course the internet.  Cyberspace.  What a wonder to an old man raised with bakelite phones, 6 digit phone numbers, a time before tv.  So much.  So much to say thank you for. More than can be expressed in any list, no matter how long.

How about, for example, oxygen?  Or the properties of water?  We are made of stardust, animated elements spun out so long ago at the birth not of our nation, not of our planet, not of our solar system, not of our galaxy, but of our universe.  And now they walk, talk, consider their origin.  How damned amazing is that?

So.  Thanks.