SELF IMPROVEMENT

Regional Tennis Medal, Emporia, KS

Life isn’t about being better than anyone else except yourself. Perfection may not be possible, but improvement is always there for the effort. We may get beaten in the game, but if we got better, we were victorious.  We often don’t know what’s possible until we encounter a higher standard.

I still recall a state doubles tennis match when my partner and I were waxed by superior opponents. Our coach told us after the match on the KSU campus that one of the players on the other side of the net was the son of the university tennis coach.  But the tough competition ranked it as the best tennis I had ever played and I still think positively about the experience!

 

BLITZ SPIRIT!

Air Raid Shelter, London

Germany’s primary offensive strategy at the outset of World War II was their use of the blitzkrieg or “lightning warfare”.  After defeating France and establishing a foothold by the North Sea across from Britain, they initiated a bombing campaign now known as The Battle of Britain.  Their intention was to break the morale of the British people to acquire a quick capitulation by pressuring Churchill.  It lasted from 1940 into 1941. 

A total of 300 German bombers attacked London on September 7, 1940, in the first of 57 consecutive nights of relentless bombing.  The bombing sent the people into underground shelters isolating with their families every night.  By the end of 1940, over 15,000 civilians had been killed.  But the bombing did not accomplish its desired objective, rather it had the opposite effect by coalescing the British people to face a common enemy with a steady resolve!  A Gallop poll revealed that 97% of Britons expected to win the war, volunteers increased, longer shifts were worked and contributions for “Spitfire Funds” increased as the Britons out produced the Germans in aircraft.  And they turned the blitzkrieg on its ear with their self-proclaimed “blitz spirit”!

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of folks that have been intently observing all of the blitzkrieg initiatives in our country for almost four years, starting with the relentless first two and a half years of a sham impeachment of our duly elected President.  This included a special investigation costing millions of taxpayer dollars followed by no evidence of impeachable wrong doing.  The entire fiasco distracted the nation from the release of a worldwide viral pandemic which has sent all of us into an attempted economic and morale buster.  Politics in America seems to have reached a new low in divisiveness.    

As the 2020 “infection election” draws nearer, most of us around the country have sat in our living rooms dutifully trying to slow the spread of the virus while watching protests in the streets being hijacked by criminal rioters.  And we have watched as mayors of many of our largest cities stand by and let them destroy the safety and property of their citizens—and our country!  Now we’re even hearing “Chicken Little” screaming about the Post Office and a six-foot meteor that has less than a one-half of one percent chance of hitting our planet close to election day.

Political polls were totally wrong in the Presidential election of 2016, perhaps because of the Silent Majority that loves this country and its foundational beliefs.  This country is not perfect and it’s imperative to make it better.  Even Martin Luther King, Jr understood that the majority of Americans and people all over the world like the 1940 Britons also understand that a systematic blitzkrieg of violence and deception is not the ultimate way to victory. 

And that can stir a Blitz Spirit in response!     

 

CHICKEN KARMA

Roosting Chickens, Internet Domain

A lot of the old country wisdom the human race acquired during the agrarian age is sadly slipping into the dust bins of history.  My parents were part of a declining generation to grow up on a farm in central Kansas, so I still have distant echoes of this wisdom every now and then as the situation arises.  And some childhood memories still remain on a short leash, depending how much of an impression they left on my psyche at the time. 

Once I received a birthday bicycle, I rode that bike all over the neighborhood and even occasionally strayed beyond the outer forbidden fringes.  I also tested the boundaries of how fast I could maneuver it over the city streets and sidewalks.  On one very memorable day, I had almost reached warp speed on my bike as I made a sharp left turn onto a neighbor’s concrete driveway scattered with gravel.  The bike shot out from under me in an instant and the resulting fall left both of my exposed knees and elbows bloodied from sliding across the oversized sandpaper!  When I limped back into our house on that sunny summer day, all that my unsympathetic mother could say was “Well, it looks like the chickens have come home to roost.  I told you this would happen!”  It always excessively smarts when someone is chastising you and you know they’re right.

The consequences of our deeds generally catch up with us and “what goes around, comes around”.  That goes for both good and bad deeds.  It’s also been said that doing good is like scattering bread on the water.  Sooner or later it circles back around to us.  Kinda’ like karma.  Generally speaking, if you’re mean-spirited, bad things happen and if you’re kindly, good karma happens.

So it was with some neighborly texting today.  I was just made aware that someone I knew had contracted the Covid virus.  A neighbor sadly reported that a weekend beach trip resulted in being surrounded by people everywhere that were not social distancing or wearing protective masks.  We humans are relational beings, so we like to be social.  And it was noted that we’re all beginning to experience “quarantine fatigue” after months of isolation from one another.  After watching the feature group in the Scottish LPGA get put on the clock for slow play yesterday, I had texted earlier “let’s put 2020 on the clock, get a vaccine in play, and make the turn to toast 2021 together again!” 

And the hope is that we will all once again freely gather on the beaches, at sporting events, in our places of worship, at the mall, in airplanes, hotels and restaurants, etc.  But if there are still those who do not respect a very contagious virus among us, then “chicken karma” will be visited upon us and “the chickens will have come home to roost” once again.  

 

REMEMBER THE COYOTE!!!

Don't ever forget to stand just behind the social distance X's

X      X      X      X      X      X      X

on the floor at check out stations during these pandemic days!

 

GOOD OL’ COUNTRY WISDOM

Vine-ripened Tomatoes, Colfax, NC

I swung by the local Farmer’s Market this morning on a carantining drive to pick up some vine-ripened, summer tomatoes.   A good ol’ country woman was just checking out a customer as I approached her scale.  I overheard her saying “This’ll all be over after the election.”  And then she wryly looked me in the eye and concluded “And we’ll all be over if we don’t vote right.”  I wasn’t about to get her riled up and ask who she was voting for in November!

And just for the record, good ol’ country knowledge is being aware that tomatoes are a fruit while good ol’ country wisdom is knowing not to put them in a summertime fruit salad.  But really, good ol’ country living is knowing how to make a ‘mater sandwich and mix them in a Bloody Mary for an appetizer!

 

CLOUD IMAGES

Teddy Bear

Centaur 

Jamestown, NC

Bored with the lockdown? Boredom frees our brains to be less focused and be more creative. 

Remember your bored times as a kid looking for images in the clouds? 

Summer afternoon skyscapes with Centaurs and Teddy Bears are fertile grounds for curing COVID boredom.

CHALLENGING BUT ATTAINABLE

Approaching the Tee Box, Archdale, NC

One of my favorite definitions I have always liked to use and repeat regarding forecasting and personal improvement goals is that they are thoughtfully considered to be “challenging but attainable”.  And it’s interesting how many things in life this can affect.  One of the main attractions of the game of golf is that it so imitates life itself and can never be perfected.  I’ve commented many times that if the game were easy, we’d quickly lose interest.  Nobody can accuse the game of life as easy.  Maybe that’s why?  If you’ve ever lost interest in life, such as during a pandemic lockdown, consider if you’re not challenging yourself enough. 

As I’ve advanced through the many stages of life and aging, this truism has been reinforced many times over.  A child’s ten-piece puzzle isn’t much of a challenge compared to a puzzle of one thousand pieces.  If the final conquest of holing a putt was into a one-foot diameter hole, the skill and attention to putting would most certainly be diminished.

One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movie lines is that “a man’s got to know his limitations.”  I ran cross country in high school.  If you ever see me running these days, you’d better join me!  I work out at the gym (in better times), but I do not join the gym rats in their routines.  That’s why we now have multiple tee boxes on a golf course.  Many courses no longer label them as women’s, senior’s, flat belly’s, etc.  The tees are colored differently and the score cards simply state the total course length from each color.  You choose which tee is “challenging but attainable” for your game in time.  At yesterday’s PGA championship one of the pro golfers hit a five iron 250 yards!  Before I switched my five iron to a hybrid club, I hit that club 150 yards.  That’s why he plays from the back tees and I play much further up to keep it real!    

All of life is a circle, sunrise to sunset, season to season.  We start moving back to the longer tee boxes as we progress in the game and then we gradually begin to move back up as the gift of time passes.  It’s called growing up in the game and then growing old gracefully, while we’re still in the game.  

 

APPROACHING LIFE PHILOSOPHICALLY

Auschwitch, Internet Domain

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.  History has stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”  --George Orwell, 1984

All human beings share a common desire for meaning.  Did you choose to be born?  Neither did anyone else!  Jean-Paul Sartre reasoned that once born we are “condemned to be free”.  But with freedom comes responsibility.   And even when restrained, we always have the freedom regarding how we respond to circumstances.  Pragmatism teaches that we all have the capacity to strive to make things better in life, even though we will never achieve perfection.  We may be terribly restrained in life, but we have the freedom to act well.  Compassion for a child, animal or forest comes from being aware that we’re all interconnected.

No single role such as our jobs, our relationship status, our political views, our philosophical views, etc. can ever define a person since we are always changing.  Our elders teach us that you can never cross the same river twice because by the time you cross again, both you and the river have changed.  Aristotle encouraged his students to strive for success but acknowledge that external forces can inhibit that progress.  Hedonic calculus predicts whether something will be pleasurable in the long run or not, e.g., drinking beer all evening (short term pleasure or long-term pain) or studying at a university (short term pain for long term gain).  Actually, I was able to validate both examples on my way to achieving both of my degrees!

St. Augustine reminds us that the presence of evil gives us a perspective on those things that are good, e.g., a long harsh winter gives us a much greater appreciation for the warming spring.  A visiting tourist at the preserved Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz asked a guide why the locals hadn’t simply burned such a terrible place to the ground after the prisoners had been freed.  He replied that it had been discussed but after thoughtful consideration they wanted to preserve this place of horror as a reminder to the world that the events which created it would never be repeated.   Hate has created many problems in our history but has never solved any yet.   

 

THE QUENTIN QUARANTINO LOCKDOWN BLUES

Stay Home Ticket

Now that the Coronavirus self-isolating routine has grimly settled into the heat and humidity of the long hot summer of 2020, the promise of a viable vaccine in record time by year’s end is a small distant thread to hold onto.  The Quentin Quarantino Lockdown Blues is comfortably settling into most living rooms around the world but we will persevere with the assist of all those creative folks out there with a sense of humor.  One sage wrote that “we can all agree that in 2015 not a single person got the answer to ‘where do you see yourself 5 years from now.’”  

A quick check of all the social media outlets where we now have time to burn reveals lots of quirky material.  Unfortunately, some have discovered that years like 2020 last for an entire year!  This has prompted many city dwellers to throw open their windows and shout “I’m tired of 2020 and I won’t take it anymore!”  A quick check of video clips from the 1976 movie “Network” has a Deja vu fact check that the world hasn’t improved much since then.  Peter Finch’s character, a veteran news anchorman who discovers that he’s losing his job, goes off with “We know things are bad - worse than bad, They're crazy! It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.’”

As the boredom sets in, it has been observed that many children are named after places where conception occurred with names like Paris, etc., so we can now expect a lot of babies soon with names like Quarantine, etc.  Another deep thinker has raised a very pertinent question, asking “Has anybody let the Amish know what’s going on?”  And someone else pleads to “whoever started your game of Jumanji in January please finish it ASAP!”

Bored homebodies are starting to alphabetize their medicine cabinets.  A frequent flyer road warrior who is missing the airport destination codes like LAX and ORD has devised codes for our current travels like LVG, BTH, and MBR for living room, bath room and master bed room.  One meticulous housewife detailed a seven-day menu of “steak, burgers, spaghetti, Ramen, creamed corn, road kill squirrels, and dried grass with clover salad.” 

And folks are getting just more than a little irritated with celebrities being tested without even having symptoms while most are told to stay home and wash their hands all day.  We’re advised that the best way to get tested is to cough near a celebrity and wait.  While we’re on the subject, everyone is just about up to here with these millionaires living in West Coast McMansions singing “Imagine” on social media and lamenting that “we’re all in this together”. If this quarantine is the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do in life, you haven’t had a very hard life.

Finally, there’s an account of a nurse trying to comfort a man who’s coming out of a six-month coma as he slowly says, “Man, I can’t wait to go to a baseball game!”  Given the current dearth of sports on TV this weekend, I’ll be watching the World Origami Championships on Paperview.