Vacation – Serenity Through Sweat

Make your own kind of music

It was winter break of my junior year of college, December 2007 and January 2008. I was burning the candle at both ends. Flying, studying, surfing, partying, playing ultimate Frisbee. Even youth has is limits.

I had a stress fracture in my shin and arthritis in both ankles at the ripe old age of 20.

I was laid up on the couch and my roommate had given me the first few seasons of Lost on DVD.

The rooftop from our airbnb in Marseille

This was back when we would sit down together for scheduled programming. If we were lucky, it was DVR’ed, and we could fast forward through commercials.

I was two or three seasons behind and the combination of my limited mobility and break from school made the perfect environment for a binge watch.

It’s hard to go back in time to relive the cultural phenomenon that was Lost. Game of Thrones maybe came close, but it was a different time.

The cold open of season 2 episode 1 Man of science man of faith originally aired Sep 21 2005. It brought a swift end to the cliffhanger ending from season one introducing us to Desmond Hume the sole inhabitant of the hatch.

Cathedral Notre dame and beach day in the Mediterranean

We see Desmond go through his morning routine in the isolation of the hatch while listening to “make your own kind of music” by Cass Elliot.

We also see lead character Jack Shepherd meet Desmond in a flash back as they are both doing a tour d’ stade. Running every step in every section of a stadium.

I was hooked on the show and couldn’t wait to catch up and watch weekly with my friends.

This was also the time when I first thought about endurance sport. I remeber watching Lost on DVD in my basement while wearing an air cast and elevating my leg and looking up ultra marathons at the same time.

Boat tour past Chateau D’if and haling and swimming in the Frioul archipelago

I was unable to put weight on my foot without pain, so the obvious reaction for me was, when this is healed, how far can I go?

I have yet to do an ultra marathon, but I’ve done my fair share of tour d’ stade around the country.

Needless to say, the show, and those characters specifically, had a big impact on me. I still like to use Desmond’s line when he leaves Jack to resume his stadium run, “I”ll see you in another life brother” in that dashing Australian accent.

All that trip down memory lane to say, I was thinking about that song, that show, that simpler time in my life, while I was reflecting on my summer vacation with my family.

We had planned to take Speedy and El Duderino on our first big trip once they were both over five. We took months planning a trip to Marseille and continuing on a Mediterranean cruise out of Athens.

The places we visited and the memories we made were magical. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. And yet, there were aspects of the trip that made it feel like a national Lampoons family vacation movie.

Our flight plans changed last minute due to airplane swaps and an ATC strike in France. We ended up flying to Amsterdam and taking two trains with a subway connection through Paris to Marseille. From the end of my work trip to reaching our Airbnb, I think it was roughly 36 hours of travel time.

My father was pickpocketed while protecting Speedy in the subway car in Paris, in almost exactly the same spot I was pickpocketed years earlier on the trip where I proposed to Heather.

At the Airbnb, my father fell down some stairs breaking a few toes. El duderino fell in the pool and got a cut under his chin that probably could have been stitched. Speedy fell off the deck and we were worried about a concussion.

Acropolis tour and getting on the cruise ship

There were wildfires in the Calanques National park not more than a few miles from where we were staying. The smoke was bad enough to close the airport to all flights the day before we were scheduled to fly to Athens for our cruise.

During the cruise, Heather, Speedy, and I all took turns with 2 day colds and fevers.

On paper, it seemed like a comedy of errors. Like one thing going wrong after the next. But that isn’t really how i saw it. That isn’t how it felt.

Sometimes, in a bjj or wrestling match or in a race, things aren’t going your way, but you are in it. You quickly acknowledge the setback or the unfavorable circumstance and move forward. The clock is ticking, and you need to adjust your strategy and keep moving. Sometimes you come out on top, and sometimes you don’t. But you keep moving.

There were certainly times when I felt overwhelmed. Times when I felt like I would be letting the family down if I couldn’t solve the next problem or tackle the next challenge.

But I dont think that is how I will remember the trip. I certainly dont think that’s how the boys will remember the trip.

Sometimes, we get to make our own kind of music. The music can change the way the story feels. The way it unfolds in our minds and our hearts in spite of what is in front of our eyes.

We saw such beautiful places and we did it together. We had experiences, fun, and challenging and new. We rolled with the punches, and we overcame. Together.

I hope that my boys can look back fondly on this first of hopefully many family trips.

I hope that they can appreciate the time spent together in a family adventure.

I hope that someday, they can laugh with me about obstacles overcame and challenges met that they hopefully didn’t even recognize.

I hope they can grow into young men who can meet those same obstacles and challenges head-on with families of their own.

Boat cruise, swimming and Delos tour in Mykonos

I hope they can make their own ki d of music, to whatever beat they find appealing. I hope that they can be the author of their own destiny, writing the story the way they want it to be read. I hope we can all find serenity along the way.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Merriam-Webster

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week, I wanted to share another interesting story I found while researching my linguistics project.

The history of dictionaries may seem like a boring subject. You write down words, and you define them. How hard could it be? There are actually a lot of questions that must be answered when deciding how to make a dictionary.

“What is the relationship between words and phrases? How far should a dictionary go in recording nominal phrases? (Fire escape, forest fire)”

“How strictly should a dictionary confine its inventory to recorded usage? Can a spelling form be shared by more than one word (record as a number and record as a verb).”

“How much attention should be paid to etymology? (Weave intransitive vs transitive verb)” Weave in and out of traffic, and Weave clothes on a loom come, from different origin words as an example.

Making a dictionary becomes a little more complex than just a book to check when you don’t trust your scrabble opponent.

One of the most popular dictionaries in the US, is the Merriam-Webster brand. Their story was featured in the chapter I was researching, on the history of lexicography.

“The Merriam dictionaries trace their history back to the American Dictionary of the English Language dutifully compiled by the polemical lexicographer Noah Webster in 1828. It contains no fewer than 70,000 entries”

“Webster was an indefatigable collector of words with a rare gift for definition writing.”

“Unfortunately, his etymologies were influenced by his belief that modern languages, including English, are derived from something called Chaldean, which he believed was the language used by Adam and God for their conversations in the Garden of Eden and the immediate precursor to Hebrew.”

“After his death, his successors-including his son-in-law, Chauncey H. Goodrich, and the redoubtable Noah Porter, president of Yale College- quietly abandoned the Chaldaean hypothesis and brought the etymologies into line with the findings of Germanic and Indo-European scholarship.”

That is a lot to unpack for a book that has been mostly superceded by online reference checking. But recall that for generations, the Webster dictionary reigned Supreme. It is eerie to think about how much power definition holds, and how that power was held by a religious fanatic.

I grew up Roman catholic, and considered myself fairly devout until after high-school. Even I had never heard of Chaldean before.

After some very preliminary research it seems that the Chaldean people were in Mesopotamia around 11-12 thousand years ago, and were assimilated into the Babylonians. You may recognize that name from it’s own biblical reference the tower or babel.

Apparently there are multiple references not only in the Bible, but also from other renowned scholars, (Pliny the elder and Cicero) to Chaldean knowledge. There appears to be multiple references to their expertise in astronomy, astrology, vibrations, and numerology.

Some or all of that may be nonsense. I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t know how to know if any of it is real or not. Either way, it is fun to think about next time you have to check the dictionary when your five year old asks the difference between gunk and sludge.

We base our lives on definitions. How we identify ourselves, each other, the occurrences of our day to day experiences, they all depend on agreed upon definitions. The ability to set those definitions is a great power. And, as Uncle Ben would say, with great power comes great responsibility.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Empathy

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. After a busy week on vacation we are back and better than ever, with an interesting take on empathy.

The following article was posted on Sunday’s with Sisson, and was an incredibly compelling read. The cliff notes version is that consumption of physical painkillers (acetaminophen was used in the experiment testing) blunt not only our own pain, but also our neurochemical pathways for empathy for the pain of another.

That’s a pretty heavy scientific finding, and as the author’s put it, “Because empathy regulates prosocial and antisocial behavior, these drug-induced reductions in empathy raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen, which is taken by almost a quarter of adults in the United States each week.”

I’m going to take a somewhat anti NSAID (non steroidal anti inflammatory drug) position in this post, but I want to clarify that these products have their important uses and have both improved and saved lives.

Acetaminophen as a fever reducer, especially for infants is a godsend. Pain management is a critical component to successful outcomes in many surgical, medical, and rehabilitation environments.

That being said, it is easy to misuse and abuse. That is coming from a guilty party, who spent the better part of my wrestling career eating Tylenol, Advil, and Aleve like a unsupervised child in a candy store.

Speedy’s first flight and a beautiful day at the beach

I remember a conversation I had with my wife after first starting jui jitsu, that despite being very similar to wrestling, my mindset was so much different in my practice of the gentle art. I remember telling her how I used to run through training partners in the wrestling room. In the pursuit of my own competitive goals, I pushed some of my teammates beyond their athletic comfort level, sometimes into over exertion and injury. There wasn’t any room for feelings or slowing down to teach them, it was all about me.

Contrast that with my practice of Jui Jitsu where I spend a lot of time explaining to someone how a position or scenario unfolded, and what they could have done differently, or posing those same questions to my brothers and sisters on the mat with a reasonable expectation that they will be answered. I start each round asking my training partners about their level of preparedness prior to each roll, how they are feeling, positions that they want to work on or avoid based on injury or weakness.

There is a gentleman’s agreement amongst almost all Jui Jitsu practitioners, that even if someone is too stubborn to tap out, it is your responsibility to your training partners to maintain their safety, especially above and beyond any of your own training goals. This same concept applies to an extent in wrestling, (you are responsible for safely returning an opponent to the mat when you forcefully remove them from it). But, because of the differences in rule sets, wrestling can largely be about moving someone where they don’t want to go, rather than systematically attacking from the changing positions you find yourself in, in Jiu Jitsu.

Some may say that wrestling is inherently more of a tough, grinding, grappling sport, when compared to the flow of jui jitsu, and they may be right. It can also be said that even my own stunted emotional maturity in my thirties is still light-years beyond that of my late teens. I would say however, that there is a significant difference in my self medication habits between the two periods of similar grappling activity, and I’m wondering how much of a impact this has had on my empathy, and thus my social engagement.

Beyond sport, there is nothing quite like being a parent to enhance and clarify your sense of empathy. There is something about carrying a kicking and screaming child that enables that neural pathway to empathize with all the other parents who have gone down the path before.

And if it takes a village to raise a child, as they say, sharing in the emotional well-being of said villiage is in the best interest of all the parents.

As I chased a screaming El Duderino around the Southern tier brewery’s outdoor seating area, and tried to keep him from terrorizing his little brother as well as the other patrons, I was pleasantly surprised to get a fist bump from a fellow father saying “dad, you’re doing great”.

This man’s empathy put a smile on my face and gave me the extra boost I needed to maintain some modicum of serenity throughout the rest of the afternoon.

So where NSAIDs may well blunt some of our more important social niceties along with some pain, it turns out sunshine and craft beer might just help replace them. (Trust the science)

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.