Energy Yoga Flow - Day 1 - Restorative Yoga Challenge

18.6 5 in a row on the way to 21

18.5 Even Though it Hurts Sometimes, I Still Play Basketball at 48

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.

18.4 Anonymous and Confidential

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?

18.3 Bethel Primetime

18.2 Activity Log (2/10/18)

1. Yoga.  
2. Read The Epic of Eden 
3. 250 pushups
4. 50 pullups
5. 30 minutes on the elliptical
6. Print handouts for tomorrow's Sunday School class--Week 6 of The Epic of Eden.
7. Watch basketball, including Bethel vs. MVNU.  We lost.
8. More reading, including Dave Isay's Callings.
9. Channel surf.
10. Dogs to the park.  Video below.

18.1 Return

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.