Interlude 7: Bent Out of Shape

Guess what?

I've done it again.

That's right.  Given the freedom and opportunity, I have managed to extend the time frame of personal injury one can inflict upon ones self in a relatively short period of time.

I am so proud.

Remember a couple posts back, my story about the back injury?  Well, this isn't about that. While I was nursing that back to health(get it?  Back?  My back, back to health?  Ha!  Haha!  See how I'm funny?  Shut up.), I was mixing up my work-out routine to take some strain off of my back.

A couple weeks ago I decided to use one of the seated hamstring curl machines.  In a nutshell, you sit down, strap a bar across the top of your thighs near the knees, and then starting with legs straight and a different bar under your ankles, you pull your feet down and do "curls" with the back of your thighs.

In case you weren't sure what those were.

Now, I don't know how many of you work out with any regularity, but a couple things you start to get picky about when you work out with free weights or machines, but especially machines, are range of motion and not slamming the weights back on the stack (especially due to lack of range of motion.)

As I was adjusting the machine, at first the weights were slamming back to stop before I was getting my legs close enough to straight.  This was hampering my range of motion in the exercise and was, in general, just plain annoying.

Fortunately, the machine had several wonderful adjustment points for the both the knee support bar and the ankle pull bar.

And, as it turns out, you are allowed to adjust yourself straight to stupidity and injury.

Because I wasn't attempting to pull a lot of weight, I adjusted the bars so that I would basically have tension all the way back to stop.  But, apparently, it was a little to close to stop, and in fact, a tad past stop.

Which, I knew.

And yet...

... at the last return of my last set, I forgot myself and let the weights go back to stop, and my left knee made an ever so slight, slightly wet, pop.

At first, I wasn't even sure anything had happened.  But over the next few hours... and days... I realized the truth.  I might have ever so slightly hyper-extended my left knee.

(grumble)

But wait, it gets better.  (No, not my knee.)

After about a week of me being careful with a knee that just felt... off, I was feeling pretty good.  So what did I do?  I jumped on an elliptical machine and hammered out a mile and half just to see if my knee was ok to run.

Surprise surprise, it was not.

My knee went from pretty good, to not very great, very quickly.

And now it's been another week or so.

Did I bother to go see a doctor you might ask.  No.

Am I going to see a doctor?  Yes.

Funny story...

Have you ever had a problem with your health and put it off for a while, then finally made an appointment only to have the problem go away before you got in to see the doctor?

I made an appointment to see a doctor a couple days ago.  I can't get in till the beginning of the week.  Then, last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, and while groggy, absent mindedly stretched my legs straight.  I haven't been able to straighten the left knee without discomfort at straight lock.  Well, the left knee popped.

Today as I was going about my day, I noticed my knee was feeling decidedly better.  It's entirely possible the "pop" last night was a good thing.

It's not perfect, but it's much improved.

Don't worry, I'll still be seeing the doctor.

Sooo...

Isn't that just all manner of dumb?  You might be thinking about how I seem to do lots of idiotic things.

It seems you may be correct.

We were talking about "spiritual gifts" at church this past weekend, and I made the statement that I'm becoming increasingly convinced that my "spiritual gift" is "stupidity."

*sigh*

One day, maybe, I will learn that, no matter how smart or clever one may be(I may be making incorrect assumptions about that), I am not immune to doing dumb things.  And that, no matter how smart or clever one may be, they need to be ever vigilant against doing said dumb things.

Take care of yourselves.  Take the time to be patient and dedicated to the task of, not just maintenance of ones self, but improvement across the board.

Measure twice and cut once, as they say.

Till next time...

Lesson 14 - Know Thyself

Hindsight is a funny thing.

The ability to see the thing that happened clearly once it’s past, even though we couldn’t see it well in the moment.

Good decisions, bad decisions, relationships, arguments… all of these things have much greater clarity when seen through the lens of hindsight.

In the moment we are oblivious.  We are blinded by fear, doubt, lack of perspective, anxiety, panic, and arrogance, for starters, but once the moment is past and the emotions settled, it’s easier to take the time and rethink the whole thing.  Clarity explodes into our vision, the blindness lifted, and understanding takes hold.

Those foggy moments of decision can make our motives equally fuzzy.  We blind ourselves to our real motive and ultimately blunder through not really understanding what is driving us.  Once hindsight kicks in, we are often found chastising ourselves for not seeing the whole picture or not making a better decision or not thinking things through well enough.

We didn’t know ourselves.

Gnothi seauton.  That is the Greek/English transliteration for the phrase which translates “Know Thyself.”

Humans are great deceivers of themselves.  We don’t always see ourselves for who we are.  Only who we think we are.  Or who we’ve been told we are.  But rarely who we actually are.

If we did, it would be much easier for us to regulate our motives and see the path we are walking.  Is it the path of greed?  Ambition?  

Love?

It’s easy to think it’s one thing when in fact it’s another.  This is because there is a part of us that knows what it should be, and we are rarely the “villains” of our own stories.  We are always the good guy or girl.  So, we alter our perspective of the details of any given situation to fit that idea of ourself, instead of being honest with ourself and altering our actions.

If you are driving your car and you get a flat tire and find out you ran over a nail, you immediately think back to where you might have hit it.  (Well, hopefully, you immediately pull off the road.)  This is because, if you had known there was a nail in the road, you would have tried quite hard to avoid it.  You wouldn’t purposely run over a nail.  That would be stupid.  Obviously, you had no idea there was a nail in the road.  You simply didn’t know.

But had you known there were nails all over the road, if you could see them clearly and then just drove right through anyway instead of circumnavigating or clearing a path, well, that would just make you look bad.  You would never do that unless you had no other choice.  It’s simply bad decision making.

Usually, however, in that particular example, we never know there was any problem with our path until the tire is flat or close to it.  We have no idea till it’s upon us and too late.

I remember when I was a kid, we would go out to the west coast to visit family.  I have a number of family out that way… cousin’s, uncles and grandparents.  One summer we went out to visit the grandparents and spent a lot of time helping grandpa remodel their house.  New room addition and New roof.  I was pretty young, so I did things like sweep up dirt and pick up trash.  My memory is again hazy, but I think I was in the vicinity of 7 years old.

That summer I met one of the neighbor kids.  His name was Bruce.  Well, I’m sure it still is Bruce, however, I’ve never seen him again since that summer.  Bruce was friendly and would come over and watch the work.  He and I became great friends.  And as it turned out, like my friend from last week, he also was an aspiring ninja.  He even taught me how to make “nunchaku” (nun chuks, for those of you who speak American.)  They were popularized in American culture by Bruce Lee movies and are martial arts weapon comprised of two cylindrical pieces of hard wood connected usually by a small strong chain. 

We, of course, didn’t have either.  Instead, we used a broom handle sawed into appropriate length pieces, connected by a leather shoe string nailed into the end of each piece.  We were quite resourceful for poor ninja.  My father, however, didn’t think so when he went to use the broom and found it to be significantly shorter than when he had left it earlier.

However, we were undeterred.  Off we went teaching ourselves the fine art of the nunchaku.  We looked ridiculous.  (Awesome… I meant awesome… umm…)

All the things you can do when your play ground is more or less a construction zone.  And it was nice to have someone to play with instead of being the grounds keeper for our entire vacation.  My brother and I basically spent a lot of time helping dad and grandpa pick up all the wood and nails that came off the old roof and walls so that no one would step on them or otherwise injure themselves.  

We did a pretty thorough job too.  Even my dad was impressed.  However, as you all know, you always miss that one thing.

Bruce and I were practicing our ninja skills with the nunchaku, which included learning to use them on the run and also the art of scaling fences.  There was an old fence between his yard and grandpa’s and we would pull ourselves up onto it and leap off, landing ninja style on the other side.  

Ninja style landings, as everyone knows, means you land in a crouch, either two footed or one foot and one knee, and with one hand on the ground and the other on your weapon.  I actually can’t prove this is the “official” ninja landing, but we were convinced at the time.  

One fateful attempt, I made a stunningly beautiful landing (uh huh…), got up and kept right on running.  I only realized later, as I saw blood running freely from my left palm, that I had land and planted my hand on a nailed piece of wood that we hadn’t found, which was laying in the tall grass into which we had leapt, and drove that nail mostly through my hand.

I hadn’t felt a thing.

It wasn’t until I saw the blood that I realized anything had gone wrong.

Once I did, I cried like baby, mostly from shock and fear.  Because I hadn’t even notice.  Hadn’t felt a thing.  Didn’t even know it had happened.  Not until I saw the blood.  

Last week we talked about shifting our motives and intentions to love.  That this love change is the beginning.

Most people, however, would argue that this is how they view their lives.  And, I’m not going to argue about who is or isn’t using love as their motivator in all things.  I’m just going to say that none of us are as awesome in this department as we think we are.

And this is often part of our problem.  We think we are something we are not.  We think we know ourselves, but we don’t.  We think everything is cool and our motives perfectly fine and that nothing is wrong.  And if that is true, how can we ever know what and where or even if our motives need shifting?

That answer, is both hard and simple at the same time.
     You will know when you see the blood.

Lesson 13 - Mad Ninja Love

Have you ever asked a kid why they did something stupid and had them respond, “I don’t know.”?

I’m sure you’ve experienced that phenomena at some point.  As young kids, there are lots of things we didn’t think through well.  We had a plan and a reason for doing it, but the moment it went sideways on us and we were called out on it, we suddenly couldn’t remember what that good reason was.  Or maybe we simply recognized it wasn’t a good reason in the first place and decided it was better to look ignorant than stupid.

That sounds like a lot more credit for quick thinking than most of us deserved as children.

I remember this one time as a kid when my friend from next door came over and decided he needed to learn how to become a ninja.  I don’t remember exactly how old we were.  I feel like 10 give or take is probably close.

Well, I remember thinking that this was a brilliant idea.  We both needed to become ninjas.  Ninjas are hard core.  You don’t mess with ninjas.  They are masters of various forms of martial arts, masters of stealth, masters of swords and throwing stars, and they can dodge bullets.

We new this was all true because the movies said so.

And one of the most important things we needed to be able to do in order to qualify as ninja was to do the one thing that every ninja could do.

Catch an arrow out of mid-air, mid-flight, aimed at your face.  

It was a pivotal point of many of the 80’s ninja movies.  The hero, or sometimes villain, steps up just as an arrow is shot at him (sometimes her) and catch the arrow a split second before it would have punctured his (or her) brain.

We knew this was true.  It was ninja fact.  So said the movies.  Then, once you catch the arrow, you are suppose to break it with your bare hands in front of everyone so they could be shocked, gasp in your general direction, be impressed, then frightened at your mad ninja skills, then either run away in fear, or initiate mortal hand to hand combat that they would inevitably lose.

This too, was ninja fact.

It was decided that we should start there.  Step one.  Catch arrow out of the air.  Not, “learn martial arts”.  Not, “start exercising”.  Not, “learn how to spell ‘ninja’ properly”.  Nope.  Step one was clearly “learn to catch arrow out of mid air.”

Now, we weren’t stupid.  We didn’t start off by shooting arrows at each other.  There were two reasons for that.  One, we figured we should start with them coming at us a bit slower than warp speed (the official speed of ninja arrows).  It would be safer this way.  And two, neither of us were overly accurate with a bow and arrow.  

Yes, I know there are all manner of logic problems there.  Apparently 10 year old ninja don’t need no stinking “logic”.

So instead we practiced by throwing arrows at each other “javelin” style.  It’s a lot like “football” style, but less stable and less accurate.

If you happened to live in our neighborhood on that particular day, and you happened to go for a walk or drive or magical broomstick ride (I don’t judge), and you happened to go past our houses, you would have seen two 10 year olds throwing arrows at each other.  We would take turns throwing the quiver full of arrows so that the other could attempt catching them.  

At the speed with which a 10 year old can hurl an arrow, we actually had a number of immediate success.  Let me tell you, when you snag your first arrow out of the air you feel all kinds of ninja awesome.  It’s as though the spirits of our ninja ancestors… blah blah etc.  Mostly, we were just excited we hadn’t lost an eye.

Which reminds me, I should clarify.  These were not high grade “hunting” arrows.  These were more like your shoot-at-hay stack arrows.  They were blunted but still pointy enough you didn’t want to get shot by one.

We learned this when the inevitable finally happened.  I tossed a finely placed arrow toward my ninja friend and his superior ninja speed caused him to reach so fast for the arrow that his hand got there before the arrow arrived.  Palm open, he achieved “blocking posture” with his hand.  This allowed the arrow to do what arrows do, and stick into his hand.  Not all the way through or anything horrible like that, but enough to draw blood as it punctured his skin and bounced away.

The first question that was asked was, “what were you guys doing?!?”

The answer of course was, “practicing to become ninjas!”  As if this was a perfectly reasonable thing.

The follow up question was, “why would you do that?”

To which we responded, “uhhh, I don’t know!”

As was stated, we expect kids to do crazy stuff.  It’s part of growing and making decisions with brains that aren’t done yet.

It starts to get less cute when we as adults start giving the same reasons for our bad behavior.  Or beliefs.  Or anything.

I have actually had full grown adults give me this as a reason when I asked them why the did thing “X” after they came to me wanting to talk about the difficulties they are having because they did thing “X”.  

As one who’s job it is to listen, you don’t judge or criticize.  But you do ask questions that you hope will cause them to consider more deeply what was happening in their heads.

Sometimes the answer is “not much.”

But the truth is more messy than that.  The truth is usually something pretty selfish.  Their motives were all askew.

But instead of admitting that up front, they come back with “I don’t know.”  

Ignorance over stupidity.

If you keep talking, they will eventually confess to varying combinations of reactionary selfishness as the motive for thing “X”.  And the truth is, all of us reflexively want to go down that road.  Many times we stop ourselves in a brief moment of clarity once we see the consequences of our future decision looming before us.  But only because.  Otherwise, we’d go through  with it.

But there is another path.

There is a path that takes reactionary thought out of the equation.  A path that takes selfish desire out of the equation.  A path that allows us to detach ourselves from the heat of the moment and make a good decision not out of fear of consequence, but out of desire for a better outcome for all involved.

Love gets a very bad rep.  It’s seen either as flighty idealism or fluffy nothingism or that thing that will get you to the sex.

But love is actually none of those things.  Not real love.  That flighty, fluffy, sex driven love is the product of myth, movies, and teen/young adult novels.  Real love is something more.

If you ask theologians, they will break love down into three Greek components.  Eros, philadelphia, and agape.  Eros, the word for sexual desire, Philadelphia, the word for “brotherly love”, and agape, the word for neighborly concern.

These are fine concepts and they have their place.  They were categories that the ancients created to help explain an emotion that was bigger than words.  I can’t claim to do better.  But I do have an alternative that embodies these ideas into a simple sentence.

Love is the benevolent desire for someone else’s good.  It’s not about sex or family or neighbors.  It’s simply about desire and people.

Don’t misunderstand.  I like my neighbors and family and the sex (not with the neighbors or the family.  That’s just… eww).  But ultimately they all fall under this banner of benevolent desire for someone else’s good.  The minute we make this our motive and intention is the minute our perspective begins to change about everything.

The way we make decisions changes.  The actions that come from them change.  The purpose of our life changes.  The meaning of our life changes.

For many, they may find meaning for the very first time.

Love is not some fluffy concept.  It’s the hardest thing you will ever do.  Anybody can follow rules and guidelines.  With practice they can even do it well.  And the whole time they can be emotionally devoid.  Going through motions.  Making habits.  Habits without personal meaning.

Monkeys can be taught to do tasks.  Sociopaths can do good things.  But monkeys usually just want the reward at the end, and the sociopath typically has some sort of selfish motive for his/her good dead as well.

Love takes self out of the equation.  It forces you to care for someone who hates you.  It ends conflict by making it one-sided.  It removes the fuel of the fire.  But it’s hard.  Going out of your way for people who drive you mad, is hard.  Caring for someone who doesn’t appreciate you is hard.

Love is not fluffy or flighty.  It requires ninja-like dedication.

Love requires purpose and gives purpose.  It changes lives and the course they take.  Love moves mountains and changes futures.

When love is not there, people will eventually give up.  But when love is present, they never give up.  They will do anything for that person or thing that they truly love.

If you want grow, to be changed and transformed, if you want to find fulfillment, then love is what you need.

Love is the beginning.