Well, Samhain (pronounced sow en), or Halloween is tomorrow. After much debate over the matter, I’ve decided to publish here the article currently circulating in the Ave News, since it’s not available online. If you’ve read the printed version, you may notice a couple of slight changes, but those were for space and left the article essentially unchanged. Without further adieu, here is the article.
Today was the first meetup for the parkour group I started over at meetup.com. It looked like it was going to be just me for a bit, so I just did some wall jumps, stair running, and some rolls on the grass. After close to 40 minutes, when I was about to hang it up and leave, someone else showed up.
I went to jujitsu class tonight, and it was rather frustrating to say the least. I almost didn’t make it through the warmup, it was so hot and humid in the dojo, and after we started doing the techniques, I could tell something wasn’t quite right - things felt a little off, like something was misfiring but I couldn’t figure out what. Then we hit a technique where I just kept getting worse and worse. Finally I said, “I’m done,” and sat on the edge of the mat for the last 45 minutes to an hour of class.
In what I can only think of as ironic, tonight I found myself wishing for the company of a friend - any friend. Not because it’s been a hard day, or anything bad has happened, but I just wanted to hang out with someone. This is a complete turnabout for me, as lately I’ve wanted nothing more than constant solitude. Yet tonight, I have paced back and forth from the tv to the pc, hoping to hear from a friend or relative, and yet unable to reach out to any of them.
Perhaps it is just as well I have not heard from anyone, solitude after the company of friends can sometimes take a little bit of re-adjustment. They say no man is an island; sometimes, like tonight, I’m not so sure. Truly though, I don’t have much say in the matter - it’s not like I can call my friends and go hang with them - I have to work tomorrow, and so do they. I’m getting tired, and will be going to bed shortly anyway.
Well, there’s been quite a bit happening the last few days - I thought rather than write a post on each particular thing, I’d just hit the highlights, or lowlights, as appropriate.
I’m happy to announce that there is now a Columbia Parkour Meetup! I went ahead and registered the group at meetup.com, we’ll see if any other traceurs come out of the woodwork. If I’m going to move forward with things, might as well start with this one.
Despite the demands on my time, I have taken an interest in the sport of Parkour and freerunning lately. I haven’t actually done it yet, but it has caught my eye, and it won’t be too long before I’m trying it out, I’m sure. Yeah, I’ve seen it in the movies (opening sequence of Casino Royale), and seen some of the demo videos online. I’m not kidding myself here - I may never be that good, and that’s not my goal. It just looks cool, and I think it would be a good way to improve my cardio, and maybe lose some weight.
There’s a question that floats around in some circles that I personally don’t care for - ‘What would you do if you knew you could not fail?’ Umm, be bored out of my freaking mind after a while. I’ve got one a lot better - ‘What would you do if you weren’t afraid?’ While the answers to these two questions would be very close, the results would be miles apart.
‘An unexamined life is not worth living.’ - Socrates
This line of thought finally coalesced Saturday night while doing my food prep, and it was a phone call I received at lunch on Friday that triggered it. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and and off for a while in bits and pieces. I’m not talking about the big ‘Why?’ that spawned the fields of religion, philosophy, and science, but rather something a little closer to home. My question is this: why do I do the things I choose to do?
Saturday night, while doing the bulk of my food prep for the week, I was listening to the Moody Blues classic Days of Future Passed, thinking about my life as well. I was looking over the facts and circumstances of my life, and was not altogether pleased with what I was seeing. Though I don’t remember the thought that sparked a particular train of thought, it’s has huge ramifications for the rest of my life.