There is a sort of time travel we can do, though. We can't rewrite the past, but we write the future, and we do so with mutterings and glances and nudges, subtle things that we don't even notice, mere puffings, but great winds to the children of the next generation, with which we send them this way or that, like toy ships in a pond. So it is. They unmoor themselves and drift away, and it is on us to stand in a firm place with a rope, to draw them back if they will have it.
For ponds overflow their banks and join the sea, and someone must be vigilant or the wild winds may rise and tear the still waters into chaos. The oceans are thick with the bodies of those who have been swept away by some wayward wave -- lost, unnoticed until too late, and no circling as an afterthought will wrest tragedy back from the implacable black waters. That's why it's so important to be observant. It reminds us of the importance of compassion.
Well? It's that way with all of us, if we look deep enough. Inside these adult bodies are babies and children and adolescents. They don't leave us, they just step into the shadows. With teenagers, we show them our love by respecting their loneliness, and listening to them when they've had enough of it. There has to be someone there, to listen. The night needs to have somewhere in it a sheltered dry place with a bright warm fire, where sad and funny stories affirm the bond between past and future, and where silence falls because everything that should be said, has been. And with the smaller ones, the calm presence of adults is what the world is, when it's a good world. And with ourselves, we must have equal measures of the stern and the merry.
All this is a metaphor of course. It's fine to be kind to others. It's not fine to be selfish within ourselves. But we too must be nurtured, both by the alchemical presence of others, and by ourselves, to ourselves. Just as we hear the nastiness in the phony excuse, "But I'm even harder on myself" -- we must be wise enough to be gentle with others and with ourselves as well. It's a fine balance, between responsibility and self-indulgence. But that's what wisdom is -- like justice, it's a fine balance.
We have to take care of ourselves, and that doesn't mean being a slave to appetite. Sensible exercise, sensible diet. If we neglect these most basic of hygienes, shall we be surprised that something festers? Aches and obesity and exhaustion are not the natural state of a properly functioning body. Decay should occur only after one's demise.
The good news is that, while Time's Arrow flies only in one direction, we ourselves are boomerangs. We can change our course. Change your habits and you change your destiny. No, it's not utterly simple, but it's simple.
We are indeed time travelers. We are God's archers. We are castaways who put poems in bottles with the assurance that the one for whom they were meant will find them. Right now, that must be you. We walk our separate beaches, washed ashore, or pulled in by a long rope as the case may be, and we are divided by time and some unknown distance, but we share the same sun, the same tides, and the same desire for fellowship, however indirect. This is how we know that we are all children. The sand between our toes reminds us of it. And we are time travelers.
Let us then take pleasure from each other. Let us comfort each other. Let's play and laugh and be foolish until we are giddy with sunlight and birdsong, and the water and the trees are both so full of light that we can't tell one from the other. Then we'll come home, and fall asleep sprawled on blankets on the floor, and if we dream, we will laugh in our sleep.
You see? Reality is both what it is, and what we think it is. And mostly what we think is thought through the filter of our emotions. What we do is a choice. What we feel is a choice as well, because it depends so much on what we do. Power? We are the lords of that vast universe within our minds. It may be fantasy. We make it real, insofar as it can be, by our actions.
How fine a thing, to change your lifestyle in the most direct ways possible. Changing the very composition of your flesh, from fat to muscle, by how you exercise and what you eat, and after that, by how you feel. No one else can do it for you. We come alongside, and offer whatever help you can use. But you do it. We just help. It's not about big promises. It's about little ones that are kept.
Be excellent.
Here: CrossFitBurbank.com
FW
CrossFit Burbank
Posts
