Running for Your Life: Eight-Year Fix

Come next week I’ll be at this running blog for eight years.

It began as an idea. That someone who started running every other day during the aftermath of a serious health ailment may just inspire a single person to do the same. What was it that former prime minister of Canada, Wilfrid Laurier, “tweeted” in an earlier blog post of mine:

“When the hour for final rest shall strike, and when my eyes shall close forever, I shall consider my life has not been wasted if I shall have contributed to heal one patriotic wound in the heart even of a single one of my fellow countrymen and to have thus promoted, even to the smallest extent, the cause of concord and harmony between the citizens of the Dominion.”

We Canadians can be like that. Stubborn when it comes to something we believe in. Look at Canadians at war, the vast number of Canadian women in real positions of political, social, judicial and religious authority.

If it’s birthright, so be it.

Meanwhile, here we go with an eight-year fix, and a pledge to keep this up for the next eight years. That would be 2026, for those counting, and damn, I’ll be seventy years old …         

A pledge is an honest statement of intention. S—t can happen, for sure. But when it comes to a certain kind of Canadian, you’d be wise to bet against what seems like more of a sure thing, like the current US president finding the courage to act in a moral, selfless and full of grace way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Never Find Yourself

Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading

It may not be for everybody, but here are some titles (old and new) that are rocking my world:

• “Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking is simply amazing. What strikes me is not the level of difficulty because frankly it’s not that dense (and this from a person whose brain-freeze can be ice cream-binge-y when it comes to reading about physics and mathematics) but the number of times a sentence will earn his exclamation mark!

• “Innumeracy” by John Allen Paulos. Okay, so now I’m obsessed with the fact that I’ve been on the Earth for only 22,722 days and that there is just so much more to do!

• And then there is the fella who is responsible for this spate of exciting science-based reading: “Realty Is Not What It Seems” by Carlo Rovelli. I may not be picking up everything Rovelli is putting down …. But this quantum gravity business?! I can see how it’s got minds old and young stirring bodies out of bed in the morning, chasing this holy grail of science.

Next: Running for Your Life: Eight-Year Fix

Running for Your Life: A Leader “Tweets”

 In the interest of restoring the notion of how national leaders should conduct themselves when addressing the public in a short message, I offer an example from Sir Wilfrid Laurier, (1896-1911), written nine years before he became Canada’s seventh prime minister:

“When the hour for final rest shall strike, and when my eyes shall close forever, I shall consider my life has not been wasted if I shall have contributed to heal one patriotic wound in the heart even of a single one of my fellow countrymen and to have thus promoted, even to the smallest extent, the cause of concord and harmony between the citizens of the Dominion.”

                                     

                                                  – 1887, Somerset, Quebec  

Next: Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading

Running for Your Life: Soft Coup

There is such a vast different between the silky sound of this phrase – imagine the ear of a lover, the words dew-dropping: Soft, the lightest, faintest of kind and then the harsh “C,” hold on to the heartstring-pulling oooo, note like opera – and its evil. What happens when power is the mailed fist wrapped in what used to be bone and muscle constraints – legislative, judicial, religion, mass media – but is rent to gauze.

That is what is alleged. What will follow is backlash. No need to begin with hard coup, the tanks in the street, the suspension of liberties in the name of law and order, to remove the declared illegitimate leader whoever she may be. Instead the state, aided and abetted by legislative, judicial and most powerful media voice in the land, join the whispered horror that would arise as a direct result of the certain response to the large public uprisings that would follow snuffing of the alleged soft coup attempt, the Holy Week massacre: the firing of special counsel Bob Mueller.

Soft coup. Enter religion: pray it’s not so.

Next: Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading

Running for Your Life: Renaissance Reverbs *

* News note: Michelangelo trashed early work that he thought wasn’t up to snuff.

En route to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, home to a big Michelangelo drawing show (Dec. 1).

How do you put your stamp on humanity if not to be a destroyer of worlds, in Michelangelo’s case that of his early work that would be, if it were to fall into the hands of his enemies, used against him?

What measures you take to be marked as a god (goddess) on Earth, removed from the quotidian. Ah, to not be a slave to that … To be a writer, a painter, an editor, a husband, a father, a friend, an uncle, a reader, a runner, a singer, an enthusiast of science in equal parts.

Renaissance? Or living the life in as full a manner as you're capable?

Next: Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading

Running for Your Life: What’s Nest?

One day on a recent run I came upon a small, perfectly formed bird’s nest. Like the leaves I catch when the situation presents, I carried my nest treasure carefully in my hand during the balance of my run. I later sprayed it with a light coat of varnish in order to keep its intricate shape and beauty. I collect barkskins, nests, etc., for what is becoming a visual arts project I call “Dawn Times.”

That has altered my running pathways some. On a second strangely mild day (Dec. 5) I was drawn to the sound of a blue jay, who was making an incredible racket on a Prospect Park hillside. I followed my “noise,” and came to the base of a thirty-foot tree, freshly bare of leaves. Near the top in a crux of thin branches was what must have been the cause of the commotion, and the impetus for this poem:

December, Be Damned

The sound of the blue jay

spring-rasp

in December

from above and

below the way

she defies

pinpointing

throws me,

looking up

to yet another small but perfectly

formed nest in

a barren tree

jog jog jog

toward it and

she SHOUTS

so yeah

stay the fuck away

December, be damned.

Next: Running for Your Life: Renaissance Reverbs

Running for Your Life: The Republican Social Theories *

I can’t recommend more highly this exuberantly written book on physics by Carlo Rovelli called “Reality Is Not What It Seems http://bit.ly/2ADDcy0.”

In it, Rovelli, the scientist-storyteller, follows on after Albert Einstein to explain the great man’s contributions to human understanding.

While running today (Dec. 7), I had a thought: US Republicans – ie, Trump, McConnell and Ryan – are architects of their own social theories in a manner of which parallels Einstein’s work.

As Rovelli explains, Einstein’s genius was in how he shaped his thinking from those minds who had come before: namely, Democritus, Newton, and Faraday-Maxwell.

Suffice to say, Einstein, in 1905, took the discrete definitions of space, time and particles of Newton to join spacetime, fields (Faraday-Maxwell) and particles. Then, ten years later, he would boil that down to just fields and particles.

Elegant, eh?

Einstein’s contributions are magnificence in simplicity. Answers to the very existence of the world were right there before our noses, and Einstein had the vision to see them.

Similarly, before the first Republican theory of Trump/McConnell/Ryan, the social contract was divided into three main spheres: government, business and workers (unions). In those relatively ancient times, the theory held that outcomes were calculated by interchanges between these three distinct powers.

Ah, but it is the Republican Einsteinian elegance to boil that troika down to one seamless force: business.

Oh, and as Einstein instructs us, the universe is always in motion. Behold the freshly minted Republican social theory courtesy of Alabama GOP senatorial hopeful, Roy Moore: that business ally with Christian orthodoxy in all matters of the social contract.

* With apologies to Einstein’s family and the wonder of his genius

Next: Running for Your Life: Renaissance Reverbs

Running for Your Life: Curling? In Brooklyn?

Last Wednesday (Nov. 29), during an early morning walk in Prospect Park with T, our hound dog, I came upon a small group of dog walkers who were familiar to me. (And T too, for that matter. When I say the word “Friend,” he’ll stare at me, then scour the vicinity, spot the folks and canines I’m referring to, and high tail it over to them. (It could have as much to do with the Liv-a-Snaps that more often than not “friends” will deposit into his mouth but that’s splitting hairs.)

It’s a cold morning and one of the walkers is wearing a Roots wool cap that I don’t see around Brooklyn very often, and prominently displayed on her jacket a button that says GO CURLING.

On closer inspection I could see the Roots cap had some serious curling decals on them; the 2002 Olympics Women’s Curling cap, when the Games were in Salt Lake City.

Curling? In Brooklyn?

She said, yes, at LeFrak.

My, where is that? I replied.

At the skating rink, not far from here.

(I didn’t know the nearby skating rink was called LeFrak.)

Really? Curling?

Yes, every Wednesday night and Sunday night.

I thanked her profusely, and began to think that when I retire from The Post (I currently work late on Wednesdays and Sundays), I’ll be able to curl. Just like I did throughout my childhood and young adulthood in Owen Sound and Brockville, in Ontario.

(That is, if I’m still in Brooklyn when I retire; these days that’s not necessarily a given. Back in Ontario, senior curling leagues are as common as free medical clinics … )

Next: Running for Your Life: Renaissance Reverbs