Tag: Thoughts

Taking a Zero Day

In hiking parlance, taking a zero day means taking a day off. It isn’t often that I take a day off of running, especially with a long race coming up. I am preparing for a 50k trail race, which is the first time I’ll officially run longer than a marathon. To support the extra ups and downs of a trail race, I recently added 3 mile stair workouts with a weight vest and the change in training strained some muscles in my arches. I did my best to run through it, but the pain kept increasing as I put in miles on my other runs. So… time to take a break.

Taking a break from 6-days-per-week running after eight months should be easy in theory. As in, I could simply not run. But breaking a habit, even a habit that takes effort, is leaving me feeling adrift at the moment. This weekend, I found myself feeling stuck – almost paralyzed – and quite unproductive. It was like I had a computer program in my brain that said, “run” and when the “run” program didn’t execute, I struggled to figure out what was next. Instead of just skipping it and moving on to the rest of my chores, I sat stewing on the fact that I couldn’t run. I’d flex my feet and wince at the pain instead of simply moving on. What a wonderful opportunity to use a bit of mindfulness practice to overcome my faulty program!

First, sit with it. Instead of fighting reality, I took the opportunity to sit with the discomfort of the break in routine. I sat in meditation and worked on settling my brain. I found that I was stuck on repeat. “I just want to run. But I can’t. Stupid foot. Why did I have to overtrain? Maybe if I flex it, it will feel better.” Rinse and repeat. I thought through my attachment to the task of running. Really, I was attached to the expectation of being pain-free. I wanted things to be different than what they were right now. Instead of repeatedly berating myself to accept what was, I decided to focus on what I could do. Perhaps an anti-inflammatory or some ice or a bit of massage therapy? So after breaking the mental cycle of wanting to run pain-free, I decided to make a to do list. First, I’ll use a tennis ball to put pressure on the affected areas. Then I’ll follow that up with some ice. Finally, I’ll take some ibuprofen at bed time to calm the angry muscles. Satisfied with a plan, I was starting to let go of the attachment.

Second, take action on what I can do. I put my plan into action. I grabbed the tennis ball and put as much pressure as I could stand on the affected area. Rolling it over and over for about 5 minutes. The logic here was that I probably made the small muscles in my arch area “angry” with all the stair work and needed something to break up the knotted tissue. After some rather intense moments, I got an ice pack and applied 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off cold therapy for a half an hour. Nearing bed time, I took some ibuprofen and called it a night. The next morning, my foot was feeling significantly better.

Finally, accept the progress and use it as motivation to continue on the path to recovery. This morning, I decided to take another zero day. Two in a row? Yep. My wife and I took the kids skiing this morning for our second-youngest child’s birthday, so it served as a nice distraction. After we got home, I resisted the urge to attempt a run and – even better – resisted the urge to go back to stewing about not being able to run. Instead, I folded laundry, I tidied up the kitchen, I wrote my first blog post in a month, I caught up on televised soccer matches from the day, and this evening I’m going to watch a movie with my lovely wife.

Who knew a zero day could be so much fun?

That’s Curious

Be curious, not judgmental.                                                                                                                     -Walt Whitman

Simple but powerful. I coach my team to think this way. I do my best to live this way myself.

Today, we received some shocking news at work. It was interesting to watch everyone – myself included – go through the gyrations of processing the information. Most of us were inclined to judge. As I mindfully processed, I remembered Whitman’s sage advice. Instead of getting invested, I treated the news as data. I learned more about the world today through this topic. It allowed me to still feel deeply about the matter, but to minimize the disruption and get back to my day.

I hope your excitement is positive, but in times where it isn’t, perhaps this simple quote can inspire you to be able to accept the Truth of the situation and deal with it head on.

Going Home

“Going home and spending time with your family and your real friends keeps you grounded.” – Jennifer Ellison

This weekend, my wife and I went “home” to the greater Portsmouth, Ohio area. She and I were both born and (as for me, mostly) raised there. Her parents are still there. Mine moved on when I was 14, but I still have plenty of roots. We were without kids this weekend and owed her Mom some “we” time, so made the 2+ hour drive from our house to my wife’s childhood home. I think I can speak for my wife to say that going home for both of us this weekend was bittersweet.

Life in Portsmouth is completely different from our life in Columbus, Ohio. Portsmouth is the epitome of small-town middle America with a population of less than 30,000. Columbus is a major metropolitan city where the population approaches 2 million. In Columbus, we have something going on every night of the week; dinner with friends, kids’ sporting activities, organized after-work events, and so on. In Portsmouth, there might be one event per week in addition to Wednesday evening church service. When we go “home,” we experience the life of our childhood. The life that we couldn’t wait to escape. The slower, sleepy life that would drive us nuts from boredom on the long-term, but that we honestly relish in bits and pieces on these brief weekend treks down memory lane.

This weekend, I went hiking  for four hours with my cousin’s husband. From start to finish, neither of us could get cell service among our three mobile phones. Not that we wanted it, I’m just offering a sense of how remote things are in the greater Portsmouth area. My wife and I also attended a car show, which is where people from all around the local Tri-State area (Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia) drive their always polished, often restored, sometimes cobbled together hotrods and put them on display for eager gawkers and some serious bragging rights. The night usually wraps up when the hotrods begin to file out onto the main road and leave a good bit of rubber behind in a plume of blue-grey smoke. It is like a scene out of the movie American Graffiti. We spent a good bit of time with family sharing food and catching up on stories and events. My wife and I also squeezed in a 3 mile training run in the downtown area and on the campus of my first alma mater, Shawnee State University. During our travels around the county, I drove past every house I lived in until I moved away from the area. All of this brings me back to the bittersweet point.

A part of me – a very small part indeed – misses that life. Sure, we couldn’t live in the house we live in now. Our kids wouldn’t have had the opportunities that they’ve had in the Columbus area. No, we couldn’t travel like we do. Yes, I find myself getting cranky at the painfully slow drivers while I’m down there. On and on. But. BUT, a small part of me misses that simpler, small town life. A part of me misses the time when the big event of the day was putting two bare feet into the water and casting a fishing pole. That same part of me misses the house I grew up in, the friends with whom I learned about life, and the roads on which I learned to drive. Judging by my wife’s eagerness to show me the artifacts of her past, I think she share’s the sentiment.

I’m sure this is just the nostalgia of the trip taking hold. If you moved us back to Portsmouth today, my wife and I would go stir crazy in 3 days – or less. I think the important thing here is to revisit memory lane with vulnerability every now and again. With vulnerability, I mean to be open to the trip, to slow down and walk the paths of the memory, to revisit events and consider their impact on you. We can so easily get caught up in planning the next big trip or office politics or whatever. But there’s nothing like a trip to your childhood home to ground you in the terra firma of who you are and what in life is important. It offers a whole new perspective to the impending work week.

The house featured in this post is the current state of my parent’s home when I was brought home from the hospital more than 43 years ago. I remember it as a quaint red brick and red siding house in good repair surrounded by a chain link fence to keep me and our small dog in the yard. But that was a long time ago. Times change.

Ulysses: Calypso

Happy Bloomsday! Today is June 16, which is the day James Joyce’s Ulysses is celebrated around the world. In the last couple of years, I have taken to reading Ulysses and done my level best to wrap up the reading on June 16. This year I decided to blog about each episode along the way, which, as I have learned, dramatically slows the process. However, I’m also finding that I’m getting more out of the reading this time around, so I’m happy with the process. With that said, it is time for another installment.

Calypso

“In the act of going, he stayed.” In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus is ensnared by Calypso on an island during his travels. The nature of the ensnarement isn’t all bad. Although Calypso is ego-centric and selfishly wants to keep Odysseus as her own, she is a beautiful goddess-nymph  and she generally treats Odysseus well. Their relationship is carnal. But after some time – Homer’s timeline has it at 7 years – Odysseus misses his wife Penelope and wants to make his way home. It takes an appeal to the gods and Hermès finally frees him at the behest of Zeus himself.

The Cast

Now in the fourth episode of Ulysses, we finally meet our hero, Leopold Bloom. Much like the earlier parts of the book, we’re treated to a continuum of thoughts and actions, although we are limited to reading the thoughts of Bloom and Stephen. We meet Bloom’s wife, Molly, and we learn that they have a daughter, Milly. We also learn that they had a son named Rudy who died in infancy.

Relatively speaking, there is a ton of action in this episode. We have rewound to start the day at 8 AM – this time with Bloom. He goes to the butcher to pick up a pork kidney and observes the Dublin of 1904 around him. He comes home and cooks breakfast, which is a bit of a gender role reversal for this timeframe. Bloom picks up the mail dropped from the mail slot, which includes a letter for him from Milly, a card for Molly from Milly, and a letter for Molly from the antagonist, Blazes Boylan. The Blooms have a conversation about reincarnation and several polite exchanges. Leopold then eats his own breakfast and heads to the outhouse to finish off his morning ritual. There are also several interactions with the family cat throughout.

Themes

There are themes aplenty in the Calypso episode. Like Calypso, the episode has sexual references throughout. Also like the goddess, who would have been a champion for women’s equal rights, we get the strong indication that Molly will soon stray from the marriage with Boylan and that Leopold is aware. Bloom gives a lot of thought about staying and going. 

Sexual overtones: Bloom notices his wife’s feminine form and features as he interacts with her. Bloom also takes notice of the “vigorous hips” on the next-door girl in front of him at the butcher’s shop and wishes the butcher would hurry so he could walk behind her towards home. It’s “Pleasant to see first thing in the morning.” His thoughts drift off to this woman having an affair with a constable. When he misses out on walking behind the lady, his thoughts drift to his wife, Molly and pleasant evenings of the past. Back home, he thinks of being near Molly’s “ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.” The reference to the word “yes” here also will have overt sexual tones once we get to the final episode and get the chance to spend some time with Molly’s thoughts.” Additionally in this episode, Bloom recognizes that his daughter Milly, who has turned 15 yesterday is coming of age. As he considers his wife’s interest in Blazes Boylan and his daughter’s interest in Bannon, he concedes that it is impossible to prevent in either case.

Staying and Going: For me, the most important sentence of the whole episode is, “In the act of going, he stayed.” This is Calypso in a nutshell – both in Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses. This sentence comes after he notices the opened letter from Boylan tucked under Molly’s pillow. He has seen the flirtation between the two. He knows they’ll be working together and he knows his wife is interested in him. However, there are faraway thoughts throughout the episode as well. Bloom thinks of Molly’s father in the Middle East and in Gibraltar. He considers investing in the tracts of land offered in Turkey to be a farmer. Bloom considers the plight of the Jewish people (Bloom is a Jew), and also considers traveling for several weeks to Mullingar, which is where the daughter Milly is staying. But at the same time, Bloom is wavering back and forth about also staying. Notably, when he goes to the outhouse he thinks about the back garden and how the soil is bad. He has a distinct thought to “Reclaim the whole place.” I believe this is poignant. Joyce is showing us rather than telling us that our hero is conflicted about what to do. Should he stay or go? Or both? Like Odysseus, maybe he will go and then come back to “reclaim his rightful place.”

Other prominent themes in the episode include business, jews, and death. The prominent public event in the story involves going to the funeral of Patrick Dignam, who died suddenly in recent days. The episode ends with the words “Poor Dignam!” as Blooms thoughts shift on a dime to close.

In Contrast

When contrasted with the other 8 AM and simultaneous episode, Telemachus, in which Stephen Daedalus is the focal point, we see several stark differences. Bloom is older and more practical about his thoughts, while Stephen is more ego-centric or fanciful. Stephen is off contemplating the stars while Bloom is calculating return on investment. Bloom is considering “staying and going” in the face of his wife’s imminent stray from the marital bedroom while Stephen is holding a grudge over his friend’s comment that his mother was “beastly dead.” These contrasts demonstrate the mastery that Joyce had over the human psyche. By showing us a difference in maturity in human thoughts while interweaving so many other themes, Ulysses is perhaps the richest case of demonstrated human understanding in the literary world.

Photo credit: Odysseus und Kalypso by Arnold Böcklin (1883), by The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147930