I won't always be this age

When I turned 30, I thought nothing of age. I thought nothing of death. I thought nothing of incapacity. I could do anything. Possibly even better than in my 20's. I was getting stronger and running harder.

I turned 40. I gave age a fleeting thought. It was more philosophical. Not yet quite real. We were a young family still. I was oblivious of life's challenges, which I knew people were going through. I didn't have to struggle much. I worked hard and everything was looked at philosophically. I was an idealist. Not a realist. And every action was wrapped around a metaphysical context.

I'm now 50. The kids are not kids anymore. I have whatever's left of my life back. And I can slip back into my philosophical shell. The practical life of earning money to live is still here, but the end of that life is closer.

At 50, I've spent time looking at pictures. And boy, I've aged. I'm so much older. I can see it now. The incremental changes that were happening over the years were barely noticeable. It's like I stepped into a black hole and came out on the other side in a different civilization. I'm no longer the kid. I'm no longer the dad. I'm almost the granddad.

I came across a picture of myself at 11 years of age. I could see some resemblance. I looked small, timid and subdued. And I have so many pictures of me during my university days. Life was a full time job. It wasn't what you did in the evenings or on weekends. We lived twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year. Interrupted by periods of education. When I look at pictures of myself during my university days, I looked so happy. I didn't have much money. But money wasn't a source of pleasure. It wasn't what drove happiness. Money was an enabler. But even if you didn't have it. You still were able to find happiness. We read a lot. We read so much and spent a lot of time talking and discussing ideas. We built models of balsa wood. Of cardboard. Models even using cut up beer cans. We were creative. And life was good.

But as I sit here, I'm thinking different thoughts. Hopefully I get to sixty, then seventy and beyond. I'll probably look back at 50 and think, "boy, that doesn't look so bad!" So that's how I should behave now. That 50 doesn't look that bad. And live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 month a year. All the way to 60.

And when I get to 60, take a moment to look in the rear-view mirror, only for a second before charging forward again.

There was a time in my mid-40's where I was trying to search for my life back. Get that "joie de vivre" back. If I was to draw a "smart curve," it would look like the following:

Smartness on the y-axis and age on the x-axis. I think that I was smartest between 20 and 30. Those were the university days. Running marathons in 3:12 to 3:20 easily. I recall passing the half at 1:10 during the Ottawa marathon. Reading Kant, Descartes, Socrates, C. S. Lewis, Bertrand Russell, John Stewart Mill, Michel Foucoult among others. And learning about China's history of art and architecture. Drawing. Living like a true Leonardo da Vinci. A master of all trades.

But still some John Grisham, Umberto Eco, Michael Crichton and the stuff that takes you away from this life into the fantastical.

The philosophical quest died when I started working. Art, drawing and architecture followed soon. And all that was left was the shell of the engineering mind and the books of fantasy. And feeding your brain with that stuff does not get you very far. Garbage in. Garbage out.

But now I'm fifty. I will never be this age again. I look at myself ten, twenty years ago and wonder where the time went? I was busy mowing the lawn. Running to the grocery store. Working extended hours. Not talking to my family. Disconnected from mum and dad. That's what I was busy doing. I look at pictures of dad in his youth. And pictures of dad today. You can see the youthful man, inside the older man's body.

And that's what I want to do and be. I want to look back at 80. And still see this fifty year old inside.

Time and death

I recently watched a YouTube speech by Sam Harris - Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment. Sam says, death, the fear of death, is one of the major components of religion. We are, apparently, incapable imagining a world where we're not a part of it. We cannot imagine life before we were here. And we cannot imaging a world going on once we're gone. Hence the promise by religion that we are not going away for good. That there is a life after this one.


It's an interesting speech. A different perspective from the regular atheist perspective which tends to ask for proof. Clearly religion cannot prove what they claim. It's all inductive reasoning. The type of reasoning that says, "there must be something after death" because "there's no better explanation."

Another dead end.

Another dead end argument.

Sam is an interesting character. A neuroscientist who's very interested in philosophical questions about spirituality. I sometimes tend to think that Sam thinks that it's quantifiable.

He presents death in a very understandable language. He says:

Most of us do our best not to think about death. But there’s always part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, or a phone call away, from being starkly reminded with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us.

And...

But the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time, when life was normal. And it’s not just what they did with their time – it’s not just that they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It’s that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up in petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal. This is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know this is coming? Don’t you know that there’s going to come a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you will look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention, and you’ll think ‘What was I doing?’. You know this, and yet if you’re like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever. Like, watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we’re going to waste our time like this. 

Finally...

As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives.

The speech is very engaging in its two parts. First, the obsession with death, a future event that is definite. An event that we cannot, in this moment, do anything about. A future event. And secondly, what are we doing in this present moment, the only moment that we live in.

Ultimately, it isn't wrong to contemplate death, or a life after death. It is our human condition to want to understand our environment. Questions like "where did we come from?" and "where are we going?" are philosophical questions that we will continue to ask. The problem comes from drawing conclusions, just because we cannot think of a better answer.

Science proceeds by formulating theories, and then testing them. There's a hope in the scientist, that someone will come along and prove them wrong. Because their theories explain some part of the physical world. Religion is not testable. At least in the scientific sense. However, there are many things not testable that we can rely on and make decisions on. Dinesh D'Souza, who has since proven that he's an intellectual fraud, once gave this example of something we know exists, however cannot prove. For example, love. You may love someone, but cannot scientifically prove that you do. And you make marriage decisions and commitments based on an intuition that you have.

Science cannot prove that the claims made by religion are false.

Science cannot prove that there is no life after death.

However, the burden of proof is on religion to prove that the claims it makes are true.

Bertrand Russell's teapot is a good example of how the burden of proof remains with one who makes the claim.

What did I understand from the speech?

We need to know that we are not the focus of the universe. That we will ultimately go away. That life doesn't care whether we're here or not. Knowing that, we should use the time we have, this present moment, wisely. Caring about things that matter. Not worrying about things that have passed. Or spending it on too much planning about things to come. As Ram Dass says, "Be Here Now."

The Lazy Person's Guide to Running Marathons

This was a toastmaster's speech that I gave, probably around 2011. Speech #8 in the Toastmaster's Competent Communicator (CC) program. This speech is about using visual material. I sometimes use examples and analogies about runners, or running, when speaking. I know how hard it is to run, especially as an adult. I've been there. And because I've been there, I'm a great ambassador for the sport. Perhaps the greatest ambassador since without a doubt, I was the poorest runner in my high school. Kids much younger than me could outrun me even on my best days.

So in this speech, rather than give examples, I dive directly into the art, or science, of running. I began by saying that running is one of the sports that isn't actually taught in school. Unlike football, or basketball, or swimming or tennis, running isn't taught. There seems to be no technique. The running coach stands on the side of the track and yells "RUN!!!"

But there is a technique.

And it can be taught.

And it can be learned.

(ps: that foot you see in the photos is mine ;), I had my drawings on the floor taking pictures and couldn't be bothered to re-take them after I saw my foot in them).

Drawing 1. I ask. Why Marathons? There are three sections in that slide where I split running into three categories. Fast 100m to 400m dash. Middle distance running. 1500m to 10,000m. And finally, long distance running. The point of that slide is to illustrate how calm the long distance runner looks, in comparison to the short and middle distance runners. That the effort in running marathons is acceptable to the "lazy" runner.

Drawing 2. In most sports, you need money and equipment. Hockey is expensive since you also need to find a rink. Same goes for skiing. But with running, a good pair of running shoes (also optional) and cheap clothes will do it. No need to go looking for a track, you can step out of your house and start running. When I put up this slide, I had completely shaved my head, so the "HAIR (optional)" got a few laughs.

Drawing 3. Here's where we get serious about running technique. And I present the three techniques, philosophies, that are getting traction in the running world. Chi running emphasises posture, a mid-foot strike and a slight lean forward to take advantage of gravity. Pose running emphasises posture as well, but they also focus on an "S" position where knees are slightly bent. A slight lean forward to take advantage of gravity. And they encourage landing on the balls of the feet. Evolution running also emphasises running economy by focusing on minimising vertical displacement. Don't bounce up and down. Land on the most elastic part of your foot (the front). Land close to your centre of gravity. They're all fairly similar in that they address three key items. Posture. Foot strike. Cadence.

Drawing 4. Posture. Maintain an upright posture with a slight lean forward. Leonardo Da Vinci's quote: Motion is created from the destruction of BALANCE. What this means is that the forward motion will be created automatically by leaning forward. Not by forcefully pushing forward with your legs. Your legs serve to spring off the ground - and we'll see that in a later drawing. By keeping your centre of balance close to where your foot will land, you move naturally.

Drawing 5. Foot Strike. Minimise heel striking. Land on the front of your foot, or the middle. Sprinters run on their toes. Most adults tend to run on their heels. Most of this due to the type of shoes. Try to run without shoes, barefoot. And you'll find it impossible to heel strike. The shoes you run will either aid in avoiding heel striking or encourage it. Heel striking as illustrated has a braking effect. While landing near the front of the foot encourages elastic motion which returns energy from the Achilles. You also land closer to your centre of gravity if you land near the front of your foot, or the middle.

Drawing 6. Cadence. The number of steps you take per minute. Most elite, professional, distance runners have a cadence of about 180 spm. Some as high as 190 spm. Proper cadence allows the Achilles to stretch, therefore storing energy, and then return it while pushing off. Try running with a cadence of about 180 spm. At least close to 170 to 180. With a slow cadence, the energy stored by the Achilles is lost and you don't get the benefit of the energy return. With each footfall, you loose most of the energy from your spring to the ground. Elite athletes will get 40% to 50% of that energy returned to them.

Blogging

Everyone has a journalistic impulse. The impulse to tell a story. To speak at least. Families sit around the dinner table, and tell each other how the day went. Co-workers go out for lunch and chat. Lovers cuddle up tell each other how they feel.

We all like to talk.

Rarely do we like to write.

I've blogged before about the pen and the keyboard. The effects of email versus the handwritten note.

I grew up during a time when there were no computers. Everything was manual. Which means that we laboured for the simplest tasks. Writing was indeed a chore. It took a long time and we didn't have backspace, cut-and-paste, or the Internet.

Everything had to be carefully pre-planned. Everything was very carefully done. Words were not wasted. And each and every thing written was crafted. Designed.

In this age of technology, of the Internet. We ramble on, like I'm doing. Knowing that words are cheap. Knowing that we can cobble up a story from a variety of sources in very little time.

It's the fast-food mentality. Things are being done very quickly, almost without thought. If I need to write something on the devastation of the white rhino in Africa, I can have an acceptable story in a hour. It may not be passionate, but I can cobble it up. Because of the Internet.

But a pen in the hand is slow. Words don't rush out the way they do on a keyboard. And your brain is ahead of your hand. And you are, in my impression, a little bit more thoughtful.

Expression, and self- expression in print was limited to a chosen few. Some had talent. Some only had money. We read a handful of writers in newspapers. Some good authors, but they were the same ones. You had to go to school. Earn a degree in journalism, or writing. Get a job. And then you could tell your story.

The new media is the Internet. And on the Internet, everyone is a journalist. Everyone is an artist. Blogging is the new media. The traditional newspapers are struggling. Print subscriptions are limited to those who grew up with print media. The new generation is focussed on getting their information from digital media. The Internet. And not only from professionals. From anyone who cares to write. Even me.

That said, I encourage everyone to blog. Since camping and face-to-face socialising is on the decline. This is an acceptable substitute. Blogging will allow you as a professional, or expert, in your field, to share your knowledge in ways that you were not able to before. How was the engineer who discovered an amazing way to design a helpful product able to share it in the past? It was so difficult, and cumbersome, as to make sharing not worth it. However, that same engineer can now go online, write, draw and publish their work. For the world to see and learn from.

Blog often. Blog every day if you can. Sometimes, you'll hit on a good idea. A good theme. Often you may not. But the media is here. And the opportunity to inform is greater than it ever was before. But the more you blog, the better you'll get.

A last thing about blogging and sharing. Wikipedia.

I heard somewhere, that there are doctors who consult Wikipedia for medical information. This is extreme. We all know by now that the Internet is a great platform for sharing information, but the trustworthiness of the information depends greatly on the source. Wikipedia isn't a trustworthy source. There's a lot of good information there. But there's also a lot of garbage. Anyone can edit pages in Wikipedia making it an excellent target for misinformation. As a layman, getting superficial medical information from Wikipedia is acceptable. If we take it for what it is. Information from an unknown, potentially incorrect, source. But medical professionals must have better references. Like the PDR (Physicians Desktop Reference). Shame on them.

I have a Wikipedia account, and from time-to-time, go online and edit some of the pages. I've never created a page from scratch, but I've logged into my account on an editing binge. To correct misinformation. It's a difficult task. To its credit, Wikipedia is an amazing platform and shows how collaboration can work. I don't know what the percentage would be, but wouldn't be surprised if I heard that more than 30% of the information on Wikipedia was garbage.

That said, its a better world with Wikipedia than without it. Just as it's a better world with blogs than without it. At the end of the day, with over seven billion people on this planet, your words, pictures, thoughts are bound to inspire someone out there. And that's worth the effort.

Body, Spirit and Mind

The Body:

We live in a cultural wasteland. A virtual blend of everything that is antisocial, yet we still crave contact, so we design environments, artificial environments, to make this contact happen.

Our neighbors are the world. Unlike centuries ago when we didn't know a lot about anything a few miles away, we now know everything about everyone. We know what the Prime Minister in Australia is doing even before many of his citizens do.

And what's the value of that.

We no longer need to exercise. In fact, I see the day when exercise will be futile. Because it won't be necessary to keep in shape.

Remember that movie with Bruce Willis? Surrogates. Where humans lived via remotely controlled androids, or clones. They stayed in their homes and operated the clones using amazing technology. And apparently experienced "real life" using those clones.

If you haven't seen the movie, then you should because it mirrors what's happening today.

We live online. We experience everything via our computers, phones or tablet devices. We would stay all day, and all night, in the comfort of our beds, except that we need to make money and eat. If clones were around today, society would disappear.

And so the short of it is that we've neglected our bodies. But have no fear. Medicine will solve that. The makers of The Matrix were not too far off.

But I've been thinking. Is a life without a body a complete life? After all, our mental faculties are really just chemistry. At the end of the day, it's ALL physical, isn't it. Not having good physique must impact your mental and spiritual state, at some level.

That's why beer and wine are so popular. They alter your mental state.

Do.

That's the keyword.

Do.

Leonardo Da Vinci said: I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: Knowing is not enough; we must apply.

In this information age, we are creating information, some of us. But a majority are consumers.

The body is inextricably linked to the mind. Which is linked to the spirit. Your desires and feelings. It goes like this. Your mind is restless. So you infuse your body with a drug. Your mind then goes into a Zen mode. And you become spiritual. You calm down.

Even though you can be good, great or at least OK even if you ignore your body. You are better off if  you don't. Unplug from the grid and look up into the sky. George Carlin said that everyone should spend an hour looking up into the sky and dreaming. It's difficult to unplug from the matrix. Because our minds need to keep busy. But unplugging to do something is so vitally important for mental health.

The Spirit:
I've never really understood the trinity, but there is something to be said about the fact that we have a spirit. I used to think that the spirit and the mind were the same thing, until someone gave me this distinction. The spirit feels. The mind decides and acts. But just as the mind is affected by the body, so is the spirit. When I go on a really long run. And the endorphins kick in. I have a sense of the sublime. The numinous. I feel spiritually connected to everything on the planet. I'm happy. Even if things are not going well at work, or at home. At that moment, when I've exhausted my body. I feel wonderful. And my mind feels the same way too. Clarity of thought.

This connection has nothing to do with religion. Has nothing to do with meditation. Has nothing to do with spiritual consciousness, of the type preached by Deepak Chopra. This is a euphoria that springs from physical activity. Not consciously forced by meditation or a spiritual belief. Something that simply wells up when the body works.

The spirit guides by intuition. The mind by logic.

The Mind:
In computer terminology, this would be called the central processing unit. It's primary purpose is to receive data from the outside world, and determine the options available. See Lion. What to do? See girlfriend. What to do? See boss walking towards you. And you haven't handed in that assignment. What to do? It doesn't always answer the question. Sometimes "See Lion" is answered by, "push friend forward." Or, "scream!" Or "push friend forward, scream and then run."

The mind is housed inside this shell. The body. The mind is a physical thing. Even though it seems to be doing intangible, non-physical things. We think of the mind as separate from the body, but in reality, it isn't. It's a piece of flesh, with chemistry just like muscles, kidneys and lungs. When damaged, it affects the entire body. However, it can be righted by physical stimuli. Dangerous criminals, whose minds tell them to do terrible things, can be quietened by lobotomy. Or by injecting them with chemicals to alter the brain chemistry.

Like the body, the mind becomes better with use. You get stronger if you stress your body. Similarly, your mind grows when it's challenged. Make it do complex things. Stuff that it doesn't want to do. Just like lifting heavy weights makes you stronger. Or running long distances makes you stronger. Making the brain really work will only make it better.

You make the brain work by giving it tasks. Work to do. Not just input. But mainly output. Not watching television or listening to music or reading all the time. But also engaging it by making it write, solve puzzles, paint, do math and also make music. The mind grows when it does.

Do.

The trinity is connected.