Energy Yoga Flow - Day 1 - Restorative Yoga Challenge
[youtube www.youtube.com/watch
[youtube www.youtube.com/watch
At 48, my knees, ankles, achilles tendons, and on occasion my lower back, make basketball more painful than I would wish. In my mind I can still get to that loose ball, I can still change directions quickly, I can still stop on a dime and pull up for a jump shot.
In reality, all of those things hurt some part of my body a little bit. Sometimes, more than a little bit.
But I keep playing anyhow.
I play noontime pickup games at the college where I teach English with a collection of other staff, alumni, and invited guests three times a week. Today, for example, we played five games to 21 (2s and 3s). I turn the ball over more than I should. I don’t go after loose balls or really run the floor the way I would like to. And my defense is mostly pathetic. I’m not beating anyone off the dribble, except by surprise.
And yet, I still shoot. I score enough that I lose track of how much I’ve scored. I know this: I scored my team’s first 12 points today. Walking back to my office, my right achilles screaming at me, I tried to tally up how many points I scored in the five games (my team won 3).
I keep playing even though I can’t do what I could do even last year at this time, let alone five years ago. The funny thing is, most of what I can’t do anymore doesn’t really impact how many points I score. It’s all the other things. The running, the changing directions, the lateral movement, the cutting — all that stuff that makes the difference between winning and losing — I can’t do any of that like I once could.
What I missed most when my college basketball career ended more than 25 years ago was the training with a purpose, the off season in the driveway trying to get better, the hours in the gym honing my skill. I loved working alone on my game, and if I have any regret it is that I wish I knew then the things I know now about my body, about fitness, about strength and agility training. Still, though, I feel like at 48 I have gotten something back that I felt I lost some 25 years ago. I now have to “train” my body simply to survive a day of playing full court basketball. If I don’t do yoga or deep stretching four of five times a week, my body screams much louder at me while I play. If I fail to keep my core, especially my glutes, abs, and lower back in some kind of shape, my lower back will suffer for it. If I don’t use the elliptical or ride the bike or, even more importantly, do a healthy weekly dose of simple body weight squats and lunges, my achilles tendons can’t take playing full-court for even an hour.
So I train again. I train not for wins, or to earn all conference, or for championships. I train to feel young again and to play the game I love without pain.
Some days, with the help of someone like Sean Vigue, I feel pretty good out there still.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3sGjuIu6TA&w=320&h=266]
Let’s say you work in a Christian organization. And let’s say your administration wants anonymous and confidential feedback, and so they institute a survey of all employees of the institution which will be anonymous and confidential. And let’s say they send out regular emails reminding you that your feedback will be anonymous and confidential. And let’s remember also that this is a Christian organization.
Incidentally, did Jesus ever ask for anonymous and confidential feedback about his leadership? I digress.
Now I ask you, is it not a problem already if the administration is having to stress and restress that your feedback will be anonymous and confidential? What does it say about the organization, and the administration, that they feel the need to stress and restress this fact?
Somehow I’d forgotten how much I had written and posted on this blog going back nearly a decade. In case you, too, my faithful readers, had forgotten, check out my archives.
All I can say is, wow. Just. Wow.
And now it’s been a nearly five years since I last added anything to this completely arbitrary collection of musings, linked articles, images, videos and such.
Going forward, I have no plan to turn this into a carefully organized, thematically coherent, anything… I’m just going to post things and put them out there and see what happens. But if I do ever manage to write something worth sharing with a wider audience, I fully intend to post it to Medium.
Someday I might create a website, because as I think about it, I’ve produced a lot of stuff that might be of some use to someone in the world somewhere.
But for now, this is merely an announcement of my return.
For anyone who cares, entries will be numbered by the year.entry. That is, 18.1 means, first entry of 2018.
Completely unrelated, here’s a video I watched this morning. Since we had a snow day today, and since we’re starting Dante in LIT 227, I gave this as an assignment for Monday.
From NYTimes:
However you slice and dice the history, the strategery, and the underlying issues, the decision to live with a government shutdown for an extended period of time — inflicting modest-but-real harm on the economy, needlessly disrupting the lives and paychecks of many thousands of hardworking people, and further tarnishing the Republican Party’s already not-exactly-shiny image — in pursuit of obviously, obviouslyunattainable goals was not a normal political blunder by a normally-functioning political party. It was an irresponsible, dysfunctional and deeply pointless act, carried out by a party that on the evidence of the last few weeks shouldn’t be trusted with the management of a banana stand, let alone the House of Representatives….
So for undeluded conservatives of all persuasions, lessons must be learned. If the party’s populists want to shape and redefine and ultimately remake the party, they can’t pull this kind of stunt again. If the party’s leadership wants to actually lead, whether within the G.O.P. or in the country at large, they can’tlet this kind of stunt be pulled again. That’s the only way in which this pointless-seeming exercise could turn out to have some sort of point: If it’s long remembered, by its proponents and their enablers alike, as the utter folly that it was.
We won a league game 12-1 in a five inning mercy killing on Thursday night. We finally knocked the ball around the yard a bit. Nothing too exceptional here except our 9 run second inning which sort of put the game away. We’re using a very soft ball for league games this year, which helps the pitchers. In 8 games we have just one homerun. I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t hit any more the rest of the season–the balls are that mushy. But for the sake of competitive games and saving pitchers from wicked line drives, I fully support the ball choice. 1/3
In tournament play we use much harder balls. Last night we won our first game of the Plangger Invitational 4-0. We got an excellent pitching performance and played nearly perfect defense. They loaded the bases with no outs in the third, but we managed to get out of it unscathed. 1/3
We play today at “3:00”–the " " meaning it will likely be sometime after 3 due to long games earlier in the day or even a little rain.
It occurred to me this morning at breakfast
Split a double header last night. Lost 8-2 in our first game. Scored 2 in the first and then gave up 6 in the bottom of the first. Only got 3 hits all game. In the second game we were down 2-0 going into the bottom of the seventh. We managed 3 bunt singles, a hit by pitch, and a two run single to win 3-2. We discovered a weakness.
We won 7-6 in nine innings on Thursday, our first league victory at last (1-3). I played second base for a while, which is nice. You have to be so much less “perfect” there than at shortstop. I switched to shortstop 10 years ago or so, and I won’t be all that sad when I no longer play there. I’m a center fielder, really, who is capable of playing middle infield.
2/5.
Not much to say about this one.
We gave up 7 runs in the first inning of both games in our double header and never got going after that. Pitching fail to start, offensive fail after that. L 11-1, L 8-0.
At least it was a nice night.
Irony = let’s simulate a school shooter so we can prepare for something that will very likely never happen. But today, let’s go ahead and have school even though we got a foot of snow overnight.
We lost our first league game 3-4 to Trinity Green. We played fairly well defensively, and they probably helped us out with a few botched plays in the field. But most importantly, the temperature was reasonable and I felt comfortable playing. Note to self: no more 40 degree games for me. 2/4 3B.
Smalltown Fastpitch * Early Bird Tournament (May 11-12)* Coldwater, MI
With temparatures consistently in the 40s all weekend and a frigid wind much of the time, our first tournament came off without my getting frostbite or seriously injured. So I count that a victory.
Game 1: Smalltown 4 Hastings Blues 5
After taking the lead in the top of the seventh, we walked the leadoff man in the bottom of the inning and the next batter crushed a high, inside pitch over the 290+ foot fence in left. (1/4 3B)
Game 2: Smalltown 10 Westerville Capitals 4
Back on a real fastpitch field, we managed to hit a couple homeruns and beat a good, young Canadian pitcher. (2/4 BB)
Game 3: Smalltown 20 Wabash 9
The wind picked up after a brief rain storm and the temperature managed to drop, but somehow we ground out this slugfest anyhow launching six homers in six innings. I got plunked twice and walked twice and scored four times. (0-1)
Game 4: Smalltown 4 Thunder 11
After scoring four first inning runs, we couldn’t manage another as the Thunder homered five times to beat us by the mercy rule in five innings. One of the coldest mornings I’ve ever played softball. (1/3)
I scored 8 runs on the weekend, walked 3 times, was hit twice, had a triple, and went a modest 4/12 (.333). With my 43 year old creaking knees and worn out achilles', I’m not dissatisfied with the weekend. But I know why there aren’t any everyday players in the major leagues my age. It’s not that they can’t hit anymore, it’s that the first month and half of the season is played in nearly winter weather, and there comes a point when you just can’t stay loose enough to move. Next game is Thursday in Benton Harbor. I expect it to be warmer.
Season Record: 2-2
by Wendell Berry
"The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living."
"Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade--not outside it. The Apostles complained rightly when they said it was not their meet [meant] they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their vocation was to preach the word. But the person whose vocation it is to prepare the meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meet for us to leave the service of our tables to preach the word. The official Church wastes time and energy, and, moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work--by which she means ecclesiastical work. The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery, or sewage-farming."Dorothy Sayers, "Why Work?"
"The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end-product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making."-Dorothy Sayers, "Why Work"
Chapel for academic credit. Attend chapel for two days of the week. Meet for small group discussion with a faculty mentor on the third day. Research paper and weekly reflection papers or online forum discussion posts required. 3 credits.
(Note: faculty mentor would get 1 hour of load credit).
I hope we all do understand that all this crap I write is unproofed first draft crap, written fast and furious when I have a few moments from all the other crap I gotta do. We do understand that. Don’t we?
Several years ago I discovered the most helpful little book on academic writing I’d ever seen. It’s called They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. I loved the book for the ways it simplified–through the use of basic templates–how academic writing at its best, works.
My freshmen could read it and apply the concepts right away in their essays. The results were almost immediate as they began practicing the art of “starting with what ‘they say’” as a way of setting up what “I say”–that is, framing your own argument as a response to what others have said or might say.
I adopted the book solely because I thought it would help my students write better essays. And it has.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that something deeper was perhaps subtly being communicated to my students through the book–something I’m guessing I responded to unconsciously when I first read it. What the book actually encourages is the practice of virtues of humility and charity. I listen to (or read) what others are saying; I summarize as clearly as I can what they say, playing the empathetic “believing game,"; and only then do I respond.
I think the authors of the book mean to encourage liberal minded civil discourse, and I’m certainly with them. We need that. But what I’ve come to recognize is this: civil discourse isn’t enough for me and for my Christian students. Ours is a higher calling. We must read and write lovingly.
Alan Jacobs' book A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love is a wonderfully dense, insightful book that I take is, in part, a call to charitable academic discourse. It’s subtly that, and it’s also more than that. Jacobs' suggests that if the great commandment includes loving neighbor as self, then as readers (or listeners) we may well have a responsibility to treat the books we read and their authors as neighbors. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” right? And who is my neighbor?
Perhaps it’s that book (or poem, or blog, or chapel address) or that author (or speaker) I’m inclined to think doesn’t really have that much to offer me.
What might reading and interpretation look like when governed by the law of neighbor love? And what might my less than charitable or dismissive responses to some of the texts or authors I’ve read (or speakers I’ve heard) suggest to me about how far I have to go as a disciple of Christ who desires to be perfected in love?
Jacobs' book is well worth the effort it takes to read, and it is one I will come back to again over the years.