That about caps it all (the water bottle conundrum)

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

Water bottles are a necessity for endurance athletes. They help us hydrate under all kinds of conditions. But if you own a large collection of water bottles as most of us do, there is a big issue all of us must face. The caps are not universal. There is no clear standard. They don’t fit from one bottle to another.

It seems like they should. But then you consider all the variables at work in water bottle construction and it makes sense that they don’t match up. There are both hard plastic and soft plastic bottles. That means the hard plastic caps will not screw properly onto soft plastic bottles. The threads are different widths and hardness. There is no tight seal.

Or…sometimes…the width of a cap does not exactly match with the width of the bottle top. So you try on cap after cap on bottle after bottle. That process is frustrating, and it’s often done during a time crunch. Typically filling water bottles is one of the last things we do before heading out the door. Yes, the problems are almost infinite in terms of trying to match bottle tops to the appropriate bottle.

IMG_9876I know: an organized person doesn’t have this problem. Putting the bottle caps on top of the bottles as they come out of the washing machine would be the smart thing to do. But again, time is a killer and we have to make priorities. So the bottles and caps wind up in the same cupboard, but not matched up.

That’s because the process of getting caps onto the proper bottles is worse than matching up couples in a dating scenario between a nerd fraternity and sorority. None of them seem to really fit.

That means we sometimes get out on the road and take the first swig of hydration only to find a spray flaring out the brim of the cap. We’re soaked.

Maybe it’s time to change all that. Probably the best philosophy is to recycle water bottles after every season and start fresh. Find a responsible way to push them back into the plastic regeneration stream or make something creative out of them. Then choose a new set each year from one of these awesome bottles. Then clean them well, and make them last forever.

As for those water bottle orphans you already own, and we all have some, you would do well to sift through the pile some Sunday afternoon. Lay out the caps. Set up the bottles. Then systematically go through the lot of them and put caps on the corresponding bottles they fit.

Then plan to wash them in an organized fashion from now on. It’s far too frustrating and silly to go through the water bottle shuffle every time we reach into the cabinet.

Unless you like that sort of thing. The challenge of it. For you, all of life’s a Rubik’s Cube?

You can have it. I’m going to get serious about water bottle matchups.

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We’re all adrift in one way or another, until one day, we’re not

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

IMG_1562.JPGThis morning we awoke to a layer of snow on the ground that was four inches deep. It was three-below-zero outside, so the snow was light and fluffy. “Low moisture content snow,” I heard the weatherman say.

In it’s fluffiest state, it wasn’t hard to brush the snow off the side windows of the Subaru. But the back and front windshields had a scrunchy layer of ice clinging to the glass. Sue climbed into the vehicle on the passenger side as I walked around the car brushing the snow off the windows with my gloves. She was digging around the back seat wells to snag the brush and scraper, and handed it to me out the door.

I dug into the front windshield with the scraper and apparently struck the wiper blade the wrong way. It popped off from the wiper arm of the car and lay there like a cold black bone in the dim morning light. I looked at it numbly in the dark, and picking it up, noticed that it looked chipped or broken. So I handed it into the vehicle for Sue to look at more closely in the light of the car.

She reached up to turn on the dome light and hit the button for the sunroof instead. As the window opened, an avalanche of snow on the roof spilled into the car and fell all over Sue and everything else in sight.

We both burst out laughing with surprise and shock. There was an even layer of snow on everything in the car. It even filled up her open purse, was gathered in the cupholders and made its way down between the seats and the arm rest between us.

“Oh. My. God.” she lamented. “I’m so sorry…”

That was how we started the day. Adrift in our own vehicle.

Getting on with it

We arrived at the indoor track still chuckling about the snow incident. The parking lot at the rec center was all cleared of snow. It was pushed into crumbly drifts at the far ends of the parking lot. “Someone was up early,” she said.

Indeed, the employees at the health club do an amazing job every day of keeping the place clean and neat for members. I compliment the staff all the time, and say thanks. I’ve gotten to know one guy pretty well. He uses the early morning hours to drive the Zamboni-like floor cleaner all over the fieldhouse floor. “This weather must be hell on the floors,” I said.

“This job never ends,” he admitted. “I clean it up and twenty minutes later it doesn’t look like I’ve done a thing.” All the salt and slush gets tracked in from outside.

Expectations

Snow scratchesIt’s often been said of athletes and workers that you’re only as good as your last performance. To some extent, your life’s purpose is dependent on how you feel about the last thing you’ve done. It’s like we’re perpetually riding a wave of expectation, like a surfer staying upright on a board of hope. Occasionally we wipe out and find ourselves adrift without a board. The only thing to do is paddle our way ashore and start all over again.

But a wiser woman that I dated when I was 23 and she was 33 once told how to handle disasters when they happen, “It’s all in the recovery,” she told me. She was right, and that statement is doubly true for athletes. The workouts are important, but the recovery is just as important.

I once blew a question during a job interview by drawing a blank. But later during the interview I saw an opportunity, to answer that same question, and did so, with seamless. And I got the job.

F’ing up

So it’s true that while you never know when we’re going to fuck up in life, it’s pretty obvious that all of us will fuck up sooner or later. And it’s also true that people tend to admire those who eventually come clean about their screwups. Look at Robert Downey, Jr. People tend to love him as an actor precisely because his f’d up past seems to give richness to the personas he creates.

Then again, it sometimes pays to help someone realize the folly of their own self-image or perverse obsessions.

A hypochondriac woman who goes to the doctor. The doctor looks her over and says, “I can’t find a single thing wrong with you….” The woman replies, “What?! I want a second opinion.” The doctor says, “Okay, you’re ugly too.”

You can’t say that woman didn’t have it coming. People who whine or complain all the time are adrift in their own little sea of misery. No one likes to be around that for long. Even the people who do all the complaining can hardly stand themselves. They just need someone to show them the way.

Life-changers

It can take a massive correction or life-changing event to get some people over and past their self-immolations. I well recall the time my college roommate and fellow runner turned to me one cold January night after a long run in the murk of darkness. I’d been complaining about the pace the whole way, and my roommate said to me, “You know Cud, you just need to shut up and run.”

That was the kick in the pants that I needed. With renewed focus I tackled that winter’s indoor track schedule and ran all my PRs in distances from the 1500 up to the 5000. I was no longer adrift at all. There was focus. Intensity. He’d steered me the right direction.

Empiric reality

Chrysalis Emerging 4At some point in our lives, all of us experiences periods where we feel like we’re adrift or confined in some way. That’s when finding some sort of empiric measure of our self-worth can really help. It might be a track workout where the times and distances are unforgiving. It might be a Computrainer ride where every pedal stroke is recorded. It might be a session in the pool where the yardage is known and the times and rest measures, absolute. These are the abstract adjuncts to our real life hopes for actualization.

In those moments or truth, one learns not to compromise and not to complain. You can walk onto the track feeling equivocal about life and walk off feeling like you’ve nailed something to the wall. The words “That hurt” are sometimes the best form of inspirational advice you can give to yourself. Because it’s fucking real. Pain, that is.

Definition of your soul

Sometimes its enough of a revelation to generate your own 95 Theses, That was the definition soul the former Catholic priest Martin Luther found once he realized grace was more important than penance.

Why shouldn’t you pursue that kind of purpose in your life? I know I try. Every day. 

But even if it’s not that profound an experience, it pays to push yourself beyond the point of complaint to a point of post-concern or worry where you no longer question yourself. Survival or completion of the mission is the issue. You are no longer adrift, but swimming, riding and running for your life.

It is no cliche to say that all of life is a battle of some sort. People in combat have complaint washed out of them through training. Boot camp tears you down and builds you back up. Some might argue with the military allegory, blaming it for the ills of the world, in fact. But tell me there isn’t a day, every day in fact, when you don’t have to fight for something in which you believe?

For those of us who aren’t soldiers by trade, we have to make that choice for ourselves. We have to choose our battles. Like the salt spread at our feet, it is ours to melt away the fears and complaint of unknown, and start on that journey.  So go do it.

 

Posted in 400 workouts, aging, Christopher Cudworth, competition, cycling, tri-bikes, triathlete, triathlon, triathlons | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Computraining (my butt)

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth
Computraining.jpg

That’s me way in the back in the orange shirt. At top, riding along. At bottom, sitting up to relieve the sorry condition of my sit bones. 

Somewhere past the one-hour mark in a 1:30 training session on the Computrainer at Mill Race Cyclery, I simply had to get off the bike. The compression of the bike seat added up to soreness on the sit bones, and I’m pretty sure that every white blood cell in my body had gathered around the region of my sit bones just in case something caved in.

So I stepped off the bike gingerly and stood bent over a minute or so just letting blood flow move through the area. The red blood cells waved as they went past the white blood cells. “Hi guys! What’cha’ll doing down here?”

white-blood-cell-amungst-red“We’re on Ass Watch,” one of them replied. “Remember the great Hemorrhoid Cataclysm of 2007? We’re just trying to prevent another incident. Like that.”

Well, things calmed down pretty quickly on their own. I just haven’t been on the seat of the Venge since November. That’s two whole months of my butt sitting on nothing harder than a cushy office seat and maybe a hard chair now and then in my art studio.

So the Moment of Truth was real. I was officially Computraining my butt.

Ranking my ass

Up until that moment everything was going well. Over the hour I’d climbed up the rankings from 9th out of 10 riders into fourth. My FTP setup was a mere 175 compared to my wife’s 220, but she was far ahead of me from the Get-Go. She finished the day 3:00 ahead of everyone else in the room. Perhaps our trainer Darryl Tyndorf could have given Sue a run for the money, but who knows?

The woman has been training hard for weeks. in the early morning hours, I can hear her whirring away in our training room a few mornings a week. The hum of tires comes through the structure of the house like the drumming of grouse in a spring woods. The sound has its own wavelength, like the deep sounds of space or the grinding of trillions of neutrinos as they pass through the earth.

If you’ve ever stood by the side of the street when a pro bike race comes by, you know the sound can be massive. The whirr of tires is profound. The rush of wind. The coil of wheels repeatedly fighting to spin out of round are held together only by thin bladed spokes of metal fighting back the stress of centrifugal force. It is both a mechanical and metaphysical world, this thing called cycling.

Contact points

But it’s the contact points between rider and bike that make the difference in how the ride will go. Until those first couple rides are behind you to toughen up the sit bones, there’s a bit of discomfort involved. That process is only exacerbated by the controlled torture of going nowhere on a Computrainer ride.  During periods of high cadence riding, it can get pretty painful.

During the training session my  equipment kept wobbling in place. After the session was over, the reason became apparent. My trainer was sitting on some cords and that made it unstable. “Look!” I said to Sue. “Think how much energy was lost! I probably used 20% of my effort fighting this! I could have won!”

She rolled her eyes. She knows I love to play games like that. She also knows that I’m full of shit while doing it.

But I was proud of how well I rode considering the Butt Factor and this being my first time on the bike in a while. The first fifteen minutes I’d languished down near the bottom of the heap as my body adapted to the indoor climate and riding. At first the fan blowing right on my face felt too cool. But soon enough the blue Castelli cap on my head was soaked with sweat. I was getting into it.

Positioning my virtual butt

Cud racing.jpegThat meant my competitive juices started flowing. I watched my position go from ninth to eighth to 7th. Then there was a gap of almost two minutes to make up between 7th to 6th. During that portion of the ride we were doing ten consecutive two minute hard efforts with a 1:30 rest between. So I set my mind to cross the gap just like I was riding in the Tour.

It went from 2:00 down to 1:30. Then down to 1:10. Then it was down to forty seconds. And 20. But it was getting tough to get many more watts out of the gear I was riding. So I took the risk and lifted it up a notch. That dropped the gap and I passed the next rider. That’s when it became evident there were three of us together.

The next interval was a long 20:00 session at 95 cadence while changing gears to drive up watts. During that ride our positions changed some. It was forcing all of us to concentrate on good riding. No slacking off. I moved up to 4th for a while, but the next person was 1:40 ahead. That was a risk of blowing up if I went after them. That’s also when my butt went into a second round of ass panic.

This time I stood up in the saddle a bit, but the thighs doth protested. So I sat back down and resolved to ride through the pain no matter what. For the first two minutes I hovered again in fifth, then dropped briefly sixth! Damn! It was time to make another move.

Nothing stopping me

I realized that I wasn’t really hurting that badly in the legs. With concentration on keeping the spin smooth, I actually found a painless groove. The bike was still wobbling on the trainer, but that was no longer my concern. I wanted fourth and nothing was going to stop me.

The 20:00 endurance interval was over . It was time for a series of 2:00 drills ridden in our biggest gear. That jumped the watts over 300 for me, but I looked at Sue’s numbers and she was even higher than that. The girl’s got game, I tell ya.

Provision-1024x682For some reason I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of big gears and even bigger hills. The focus it takes to ride against such resistance erases all other purpose in this world. You don’t have time or energy to think about anything but turning those pedals.

My butt no longer hurt so much. I had moved past the pain point into the zone where the seat becomes part of your ass, not the other way around. I was officially computraining my butt from that point on.

And despite a mere 10 second gap throughout the three deep stroke intervals, I recovered and then held my coveted fourth place position all the way to the end of the session. It was a hard-earned battle for fourth place, and meant literally nothing to anyone else in the world. But for a guy coming off a winter layoff, it was a good effort. No butts about it.

 

 

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That locker room feeling

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

IMG_3924.JPGIt is hard to describe the desire I had as a little kid to grow up to be an athlete. When I was so young, all I dreamed about was being big enough to wear a baseball uniform, put on spikes and run around the ball diamond with my own baseball cap. I got to do all that eventually, and had a blast in that career and many other sports. I’m grateful for that.

But it wasn’t until middle school that the first real locker room experience came around. Our 7th grade gym class used the locker room every day. That meant learning locker combinations and following rules about personal conduct. Our gym teacher Mr. Davis was a strict man. He believed in the merit of order and responsibility. Any breach in decorum such as forgetting your jockstrap resulted in punishments such as writing 50 times on the chalkboard; “I will not forget to bring my equipment to gym class.”

Classic lockers

The lockers we used the were classic, and that style of locker has not really changed to this day, fifty years later.  They were painted some brand of military blue back in Martin Meylin Junior High in Lampeter, Pennsylvania. The school was brand new, and the lockers were toned to match the school’s decor.

But the latches were all silver, and all worked like lockers handles still do. There’s a hole in the handle where you can hang the lock. The latch slides up to open the locker, which always makes a familiar clanging sound as you pop it open. The classic locker has hooks up near the top shelf where things like hats and keys or socks and underwear go.

IMG_2539Competitive locker rooms

All through high school and college there were lockers like that in the gym. Many nervous and excited nights were spent standing before some locker getting dressed for games. The feeling of suiting up for a basketball game was like nothing else in this world. The anticipation of putting on that slick, clean uniform. Pulling up long socks. Lacing up tall shoes. Pulling on wristbands and other bling meant to give some kind of mental advantage. Then slamming shut the locker, popping the lock shut and trotting out onto the hardwood floor. That was magic, I tell you. Simply magic.

There was similar allure in getting ready for cross country races and track meets as well. The equipment was different with spikes clicking loudly against the floor of the locker. Running kits were thin affairs. Just a wispy jersey, most times, and a favorite pair of running shorts. Just short of naked, if you think about it.

Open affairs

The lockers were sometimes open air affairs once we got to college. That let your equipment dry out, which was a good thing for runners especially. But we also had traditional lockers in rows. I don’t know if the metal lockers we use in America are the same kind they use overseas, but it seems like every locker I ever used in gym class or hallways in high school were made by the LYON company out of Aurora, Illinois. I live right next door to that town. But I’ve seen those lockers all over the country. The metal tab logo on those products is so familiar. We almost take these thing for granted, but I still look at that logo every time I suit up for a workout. It’s a little piece of home in so many ways.

Stuck on lockers

During my senior year in college, our cross country lockers were all marked with athletic tape bearing out names. The captains all lined up on the same north wall of the locker room. Magic marker was used to write our names, and it bled a little into the tape. So they were fuzzy when they were written.

They were still fuzzy but legible 20 years later when I returned for a college reunion and went downstairs in the fieldhouse to change before going for a run. I stood there stunned at the idea that somehow our names had remained stuck to those lockers all those years. It meant that perhaps we’d actually done something worth remembering?

We had managed to place second in the nation in cross country. That was something. In doing that, we set the stage in some ways for the teams that came after us. One of them won the national championship in 1985, seven years after our first breakthrough.

IMG_3552Sacred places

So the locker room is sort of a sacred place in some respects. Yet it is only elevated by the efforts of those who stand before those lockers. Otherwise it’s just another line of gray metal doors in another school locker room.

These days the locker rooms I visit tend to be quite public affairs. The locker room at the little hometown gym where I pay $25 a month to lift or run during the noon hour has remained unchanged for twenty years. The lockers show little signs of rust here and there on the inside. Years of moisture and sweat will do that to plain old metal lockers.

By contrast, the lockers at the Vaughn Center are fresh and newly painted. They show no signs of rust at all. Those lockers are also tall enough to hang your clothes and still have room to store your bag of extras on top of the shows below.

IMG_1503Perhaps the reasons that I spend time in locker rooms aren’t as exciting as they once were. I must admit that the world looks a bit different looking back down the rows of lockers rather than ahead to another cross country or track season like in school days. Yet that locker room feeling you get from suiting up for a workout always bears a hint of excitement. I still plan for races. Still like to compete. Still like to lock it up and go see what I’ve got in the tank.

That’s because the feeling of getting ready to do your best never really changes. And sure, I still forget a piece of vital running or cycling gear now and then. Then I’m glad there isn’t a Mr. Davis around to catch and punish me. It would still be a bummer to this day to spend an hour writing on the blackboard in chalk.

But when I shut the locker and pop on the lock, I cherish that locker room feeling. I’m grateful to be working out. Grateful to be alive. And I’m not Lyon about that.

 

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The Ecco of a good man

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth
CudworthMuesFamily

Melvin Mues, at center in plaid shirt, was a family patriarch.

Yesterday I wore a pair of dress shoes to work that were previously owned and worn by my late father-in-law, Melvin Mues. He loved practical, comfortable clothing and shoes, and when Mel passed away six years ago, the family passed along some of his shoes and coats and clothes. The Ecco shoes I wore yesterday morning were part of that litany.

 

Ecco oneBut something funny happened yesterday that meant the end of the Eccos. They had a blowout on both sides of both shoes. During the day I actually noticed some chunks of rubber below my desk chair. It was brittle, granular rubber, the type that typically flakes off the arm of a desk chair arm. But there was no new evidence of that on my new chair, which did lose a chunk a couple weeks ago. That sucked. But yesterday was a busy day at work, so I did not dwell on what might be going on with my chair. Things to do, you know.

Yet this morning when I went to retrieve the Eccos from the living room where I’d shed them the night before,  I picked them up and noticed a hole in the side of the shoe near the heel. Obviously, the rubber that made up the bulk of the shoe had suddenly decided to give up the ghost.

I took the shoes straight out to the garbage because there’s nothing that can be done for shoes in that condition. No sane shoe repairman will touch them. You can’t fix aged, crumbling, rubber. It will decompose at will.

They lived a full life, those Eccos. As did their previous owner. My father-in-law was a gracious, kind and intellectual man. He was a graduate in biology from the University of Colorado were he spent his undergraduate years chasing insects to identify up in the hills above Boulder. At one point while talking about his love for the outdoors but his disdain for the formalities of the sport of golf, he smiled at me and said, “Nature is my country club.”

Now that is the title of a book I’m working on and expect to have completed by late this year.

Glacier trips

Ecco twoMel and his wife Joan made an annual trip during the summer to Glacier National Park. They always took the same route, driving up from Illinois through Wisconsin and Minnesota to link up with Route 2 in North Dakota. Then they drove straight across the top of the lower 48 states and straight on through the long stretch of Montana to reach Glacier. They visited the park for more than 20 years, then announced they’d had enough. Their hiking days were through.

Yet the nature of that trip explained how the man lived his whole life. He was one to focus on the present and appreciated the little things as much as the big things in this world. He was brilliantly informed about the structure and makings of the universe from his studies as an amateur astronomer. He owned a big Celestron telescope through which you could see the rings of Saturn and moons of Jupiter as clear as day. In 1996, we all made a family trip out to Cortez, Colorado in league with the Adler Planetarium to study the archaeoastronomy of the Anasizi Indians one summer. It was the best summer vacation we ever took together as families, filled as it was with pre-dawn trips to view solar and solstice events in Four Corners region of the United States.

Despite his chill dude attitude, Mel had his share of tensions, for sure. At his funeral it was revealed that he kept a half dollar in his pocket that was rubbed smooth from years of him fingering it in his pocket. That was his stress relief. No drugs. No drama. Just a half dollar in the pocket, rubbed daily.

Running on

Mel only saw me run races a couple times. Fortunately, I won a couple of those races, which might have gone some distance in him trusting that I had initiative and believing in my character. But one can never be sure. He was not a person who was big on frivolous exercise, preferring to walk more than run.

His true favorite hobby was sawing up wood in the form of tree branches that fell from the oak and hickory forest in his large backyard. That’s what he was doing the day he collapsed from some sort of heart issue, falling face first into the sawdust. His wife shook him back alive, but the next year was spent trying to cure the side effects of surgery and other problems, and he never fully recovered. As a guy who generally avoided doctors most of his life, he once spent a couple weeks leaning on a portico near the front door because his back hurt too much to sit or lie down. His philosophy was stoically German and rather inane, if you ask me. “Most things go away in a couple days if you wait them out.” Well, it didn’t always work.

Hard worker

Mel was simply one of the hardest workers you could meet, and applied that ethic in everything he did. Some of that “work” was organic to his occupation. During multiple decades of managing Northern Hydraulics, the machine manufacturing company he owned more than forty years, he made thousands trips up and down the steep stairs from the second-floor office down to the plant floor. “That kept me in shape,” he once told me. And he was likely right about that.

But his formative years helped explain his real-life ethic. Part of his persona was that he also loved to tell stories about living on the family farm out in Nebraska where he was raised. He was one of eleven kids, if I recall, and had to fend for himself on a lot of fronts. That included living in a farmhouse where there was no heat in the attic where he slept. The outhouse also was unheated. So the choice to visit the bathroom late at night during subzero weather toughened the child as well as the adult. And at some point in his elementary school years, he contracted some sort of congestive condition and the doctors performed a tracheotomy to keep him alive. The scar was still visible on his neck.

He loved telling country-living stories such as shooting squirrels out in the big cottonwood forest down the lane. “Sometimes they’d get stuck up there in the crotch of a tree after we shot them,” he’d chuckle. “That always made me mad.”

Ecco threeThe emerging ethos

That was his way of telling us that life does not always go the way we’d planned. Generally, he was patient and virtuous in all respects. But there was an anger that sometimes boiled beneath the surface. Mel was a deeply conservative man in the traditional sense. He read the National Review religiously and believed enormously in self-sufficiency. It angered him to watch spoiled professional athletes mumble about their problems on TV. He’d sometimes mutter and curse at the TV during post-game interviews.

As Fox News emerged as a conservative news force, he fell into a pattern of aligning his views with their talking points, and that sometimes vexed our family. His kids would roll their eyes and this son-in-law frequently bit his tongue rather than attempt to contradict the patriarch.

Yet no one really blamed him for a bit of frustration in life. He’d earned his right to complain about the world, having been sued for ridiculous reasons having to do with companies that removed the safety arms from the hydraulic machines his company manufactured. A worker somewhere would get their fingers or limb chopped off and turn around to sue the maker of the press. It was an unjust outcome, and Mel had to put up with that and other absurd vexations that afflict business owners.

The American Way

Ultimate the company floundered not from lawsuits but because the American manufacturing sector was fading from existence as American capital and manufacturing operations migrated overseas. That left men like Mel holding onto thin shreds of the machining and repair market for existing products still in operation. Then for a while, he hired a Korean salesperson who was ordering machines for the Asian market. But soon enough, that market dried up and blew away too. Those companies could get cheaper products made on Asian soils.

I deeply admired how he handled himself through all that. One can only imagine the pressures and nightly worries as he strove to keep the company afloat and took no income himself for years. There were eight or ten machinists on the payroll. Every Christmas the company would host a wonderful little Christmas party for everyone who worked there. Bonus checks were handed out even in lean years. The staff was largely loyal and intensely devoted to doing a good job.

We all wish that world could have been sustained here in America. It was built on the backs of World War II vets and the GI Bill that educated so many and fostered growth and prosperity in America following the war. At one point, manufacturing was more than 40% of the American Gross Domestic Product. But not any more. It’s closer to 9% these days.

4th Of July.ChristopherCudworth

4th of July, watercolor painting by Christopher Cudworth

Keep on keeping on

Yes, there are still great companies making things here in America. Perhaps some of that ingenuity and manufacturing business really can be brought back onto our shores. That’s the promise that’s been made to Americans voting for Trump. But it may be unrealistic in a global economy where emerging countries have labor forces ten times the size of the American population and willing to work for wages that are perhaps less than half what an American worker needs to make to survive.

I think about Mel frequently when I read the promises being made these days. I genuinely wonder what he’d have thought of Donald Trump. I do know that Mel despised the shallow instincts of contemporary society. Perhaps that explains it well enough.

All I know is that the legacy of the man I knew, who taught himself how to engineer and design hydraulic presses all on his own volition. I’ll repeat: He taught himself how to do the drawings used to design those machines. That is real genius.

Born on the 4th of July

Mel was also born on the 4th of July. That was another big day of the year for all of us. We’d gather in the backyard and in some years, Mel made hand-churned ice cream in a wooden bucket. We’d all take turns churning it until we could churn no more.  Then we’d slather that tasty stuff on the apple pies he’d make in autumn and store in the freezer until he hauled them out in the heat of summer. He’d sport bright 4th of July clothing in  red, white and blue and one year even wore star-spangled boxer shorts, a rare concession to his wild side. It was epic, I’ll tell you. We all just shook our heads, lit a bunch of illegal fireworks and sat out in their dark front yard with the fireflies and mosquitos watching the Addison fireworks show over the park a mile away.

So it prided me to wear Mel’s Ecco shoes. The man was a testimony to honest beliefs and earnest living. They were the echo of a man who was kind and loving and endured my pontifical dreams and plans even when they were stupid or didn’t work out. He knew that I loved and cared for his daughter and his other children. And in the end, that’s what matters most to a father or a mother. He was a doting grandfather to my own children and taught them many life lessons they’ll never forget. I loved the man, and still have another pair of shoes, a solid pair of Timberlands that are wearing out these days, but should last another couple years.

This is the type of dedication love that drives this world. It echoes through all of us, if only we’ll listen.

 

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A total eclipse of the run

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

Moon Eclipse One.jpgPerhaps we’ve become so accustomed as a society to seeing things hyped beyond reason it is normal to feel jaded when something really special comes along. Here in northern Illinois, last summer’s total eclipse of the sun was indeed dramatic if you had time to get outside with the proper eyewear to look up at the sun being blocked out by the moon.

This morning from our vantage point on planet earth, the earth’s shadow blocked out the moon. I was vaguely aware that it would happen early in the morning. My daughter lamented that it would be taking place during her commute east on the interstate.

So I went out for a customary run at 6:15 or so and the moon appeared to have clouds blocking it out. So I didn’t get too excited. But then I ran a loop through a neighborhood and saw that it was not clouds, but the earth’s shadow that was cutting the moon in half.

I turned toward home to fetch my camera and tripod from the house. I’ve seen a lunar eclipse on several occasions before, including one blood red moon at my previous residence in Batavia. It was fun and spooky to watch.

Back at the house I snagged the tripod and stuck the camera into its clamp with a satisfying click. Then I walked outside and perched behind a thick set of pine trees in our back yard to block the southern wind.

Moon Eclipse Two.jpgThe sun still reached the lower 4/5 of the moon as I watched it glow through the 150-600mm lens I use for photography. Slowly the crescent moon shrank and then dimmed. When the earth’s shadow completely covered the moon, it did not show completely orange as predicted. It vanished completely. I stared through the camera and waited and looked for some sign of the moon. But it was gone. It did not come back.

Many times I’ve waited while the sun sank through the same form of haze in the western sky. As long as the clouds are not so thick that no light can get through, the sun will turn into a flat yellow orange disk. Sometimes it even glows red. With a spotting scope you can stare at the sun in those moments and not have any ill effects on the eyes. Usually those black dots called sun spots will show. As described on a Wiki about sun spots,

“They are regions of reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic field flux that inhibit convection. Sunspots usually appear in pairs of opposite magnetic polarity.[2] Their number varies according to the approximately 11-year solar cycle.”

Think about all this for a moment. We are daily witnesses to the incredible forces of nature. Yet it’s only when a shadow or some haze gets in the way of our view of the moon or the sun that we stop to pay real attention.

Moon Eclipse Three.jpgEven then, some people prefer to deny what they’re truly seeing. Don’t laugh, because members of the Flat Earth Society are very seriously in denial about the fact that the earth is indeed a round sphere moving through space. The website LiveScience.com has gone to the trouble of assembling a summary of these beliefs and the credulity that drives them. Here is a quick take:

“Earth’s day and night cycle is explained by positing that the sun and moon are spheres measuring 32 miles (51 kilometers) that move in circles 3,000 miles (4,828 km) above the plane of the Earth. (Stars, they say, move in a plane 3,100 miles up.) Like spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet in a 24-hour cycle. Flat-earthers believe there must also be an invisible “antimoon” that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.”

“The leading flat-earther theory holds that Earth is a disc with the Arctic Circle in the center and Antarctica, a 150-foot-tall wall of ice, around the rim. NASA employees, they say, guard this ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disc.”

How interesting it is that the leading theory about a flat earth involves a wall of ice guarded by government employees. Sounds so familiar! Does that have any relation to other walls based on equally specious conspiracy theories and fears of the unknown?

And does such emphatic denial of science and reality exist in any other social sphere? Can we include the fact that between 30-40% of America’s population believe that the earth was created in seven literal 24-hour days, and that some believe the earth is only 6000-10000 years old?

Moon Eclipse Four.jpgTo believe these things so earnestly people have to base their entire worldview on denial of facts staring them right in the eyes. Their grasp of reality, you might say, is eclipsed by their religious and/or political worldview. And they like it that way.

Even a simple glimpse at the moon provides evidence of the span of time the moon has sat out there in space. All those craters came from outside and inside the moon. The NASA website shares the history of this visible record of the moon’s long history:

“The moon’s surface is riddled with craters ranging in size and structural complexity, and billions of years ago before life emerged, the Earth looked the same way.

“The bottom line is, everything that happened on the moon happened on the Earth,” said David Kring, crater expert and team leader for Center for Lunar Science and Exploration. “The Earth used to look just like that.”

But Earth has several things the moon doesn’t — an atmosphere and liquid water that cause erosion. And the trump card*, plate tectonics, that recycles much of the planet’s crust over millions of years and smooths away blemishes left by cosmic impacts. As a result, there are only around 160 known impact craters in existence today (though there are surely more that haven’t been discovered).

Craters come in two flavors: those that aren’t caused by asteroids or comets, impact craters, are formed by powerful volcanic explosions.

Such outbursts can be violent enough that once the eruption is over, the volcano collapses in on its empty vacant magma chamber and forms a caldera, or volcanic crater.”

Now that’s all pretty cool stuff. We are daily witnesses to an amazing record of the lifeless yet dynamic body of matter we call the moon. But it all took a long time to happen, and some people just can’t conceive that time is that big or that the cosmic cycle is that patient. So they camp it with God, who apparently with a wave of his hand installed all those craters and the detritus they flung across the moon’s surface in highly predictable fashion. If you accept science, that’s what happened. If you don’t, you have to find a way to deny that it happened in any other way.

Moon cratersThis is what the AnswersInGenesis website, an apologetics source for those insistent on a literal interpretation of the bible, says about the craters of the moon. Notice that there are no quotations of scripture to support these suppositions. They are basically all “made up” from the whole cloth of the imagination.

“The cratering patterns observed on the moon were formed during two distinct impacting episodes. The abundant small craters on the lunar highland surfaces were caused by meteor impacts around the time of the Fall or perhaps during Creation Week itself. The large impact basins and resultant maria were formed at the time of the Flood by a narrow, intense, swarm of meteoroids travelling on parallel paths. The meteoroids were likely comets or fragments of a large comet. Those which missed the earth or moon left the solar system on a very long-period orbit. This model explains the uniform distribution of craters on the highlands of the moon, the non-uniform distribution of lunar maria, and the near absence of impact features on the lunar maria. A specific pattern of cometary impacts on the earth and moon is predicted by this model providing direction for future research. Apart from the earth and moon, significant impacts would not have occurred on other bodies in the solar system at the time of the Flood. Therefore, evidence of a second episode of large, non-uniform impacts on other bodies in the solar system is not expected to be found.”

This is a complete and utter line of bullshit based on nothing more than totally fabricated crap created by people so desperate to protect their medieval worldview they have to make up lies to defend their grade school belief system. They are childlike and pathetic, a scourge on the health of our society and an insult to the God they claim to be the author of the universe. But what do I really think? They’re fucked up in the head. 

But here’s the truly scary part about the belief system of creationists and the religious worldview they abide. They’re infectious, like a disease of the brain. Some 30% or more of America’s population believes this stuff is somehow true. There’s a word for all this: delusional. And a couple more words: cognitive dissonance.

th.jpgThus it is no coincidence that 30% of America’s voters remain staunchly in support of a certain orange politician who also has a loose relationship with the facts, tells them he’s a Christian just like them, and denies global warming to boot. But because he says he doesn’t like abortions and maybe black people, they vote for him. And his two sons? They’re little more than sonspots, “regions of reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic field flux that inhibit convection.”

This truly is the age of the eclipse of reason. It moves across the face of knowledge and truth like the dark shadow of ignorance. These are the times we live in. There’s no denying that.

I was so glad to cut my run shot and get some photos of the eclipse this morning. But as you can tell, it got me thinking about what’s really going on this world, which is vexed by denial of truth, the eclipse of all that is good and true and wise.

 

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Bloody good to be alive

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

Blood cells

This morning’s training session was conducted on a very busy indoor track at the Vaughn Center, the health club facility to which we belong in Aurora. There were two separate youth track teams working out, a pickup basketball game infringing on the inside lane at one end of the track, and a full team practice for the Aurora University baseball squad.

That meant we had to choose our lanes wisely. To be respectful, I chatted quickly with the head coach of the Aurora Christian track team, letting him know our workout plans. “We’re doing 12 quarters,” I told him. He smiled and told us they weren’t doing much running for half an hour anyway. We could have the inside lanes for now.

Drilling it

While we worked out, the track team did all sorts of plyometrics, stretching and high knee drills. Getting in shape for indoor track is a question of getting muscles to do things that winter discourages. Outside the temps were down in the low teens. Yet here were kids in their low teens working out at 6:00 a.m. in the morning. The coach had them stop now and then to take their pulse rate, the indicator of blood coursing through their arteries and veins. Carrying oxygen. Replenishing fatigued muscles. It’s the same for everyone. Young and old. We are all bloody lucky to be alive.

blood-vessel-interior.jpgThere were guys and gals of all shapes and sizes on the track team. Compact little sprinter girls no taller than 5’3″ but with thick thighs and the sprinter’s butt to match.  Long lean high school boys whose shirts collapsed into their skinny guts as they ran. Thin as heck. Knees still stretching with growth. Loping their way down the track. They hardly looked thick enough to allow blood flow to occur.

Threading it

We threaded our way doing 400s through these groups and had a good workout despite the human obstacle corpuscles all around us. We were like blood cells inside a vein. Wending our way through the masses.

Meanwhile, inside the big nets hanging down from the ceiling, the baseball players with thick beards and flat-brimmed caps did stretches and engaged in throwing drills. They looked like they were on a stage rehearsing for some big play. The smack of baseballs into leather gloves gave me a latent thrill. I’d grown up playing the game.

Throwing it

I was an avid and decent baseball player all the way through high school. The last year I pitched for a summer league, my record was 5-1, a record equal to my friend Corky who went on to become All-Conference for the high school team.

Thus I was conflicted on what sport to do. At that time I actually wrote to my brothers living back east that I was planning to go out for baseball rather than track my senior year in high school. When the season approached, I recall talking to my St. Charles track coach Trent Richards. He’d also been my baseball coach when I lived out in Elburn. So he understood the conflict I felt and told me that he’d let me do both sports if I wanted to try. But my grades were so average the guidance counselor put a stop to that right away.

Yes, those were confusing times indeed. Yet that period in life comes back with such clarity while running laps around an indoor track where track kids and baseball players share the same space. All those sights and sounds are familiar to me.

Heart of the matter

Blood cells in vein2.jpgIt’s a fact sometimes that our life choices get made for us by circumstance. There is little we can do to change them. They become habits, a calling, then a way of life. Running around a track has been a part of my life for so long now that I feel like a corpuscle swooping through a curving artery until I get back to the heart and start it all over again. I’m like a science experiment with no results but a sense of satisfaction. But is that bad?

But I’m happy. Generally so. I can still do this thing. And I remember what it feels like to be a kid.  The stride smooths out and I’m running fast for my age, just like I did at any age. It’s all so relative, this being alive and kicking. And it’s bloody good to be alive.

 

 

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Sock drawer politics

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

IMG_0861This weekend a band of twenty-something children moved out from our house into their own apartment 15 miles away. The move was a delightful mix of chaos and organization. I’ve packed moving vans so many times over the years the process is almost like an art to me. The mixture of furniture and boxes and plastic bins is performance art in the making.

But no matter how well you pack stuff, it always shifts when you start driving. You sit in the cab of the van and wait for the inevitable CLUNK or THUMP to happen. And you drive on. Nothing you can do about it until you reach your destination. So much of life is like that.

Then comes the lugging and the shoving and the dragging of furniture and mattresses and boxes of stuff that won’t be sorted for days, even weeks. But when you’re not the one moving in, that’s not your problem. Instead, you literally brush your hands of it and drive away. Good luuuuck with that!

Detritus

Back home, there are still bits of household detritus to engage and arrange. The kids’ rooms needed to be cleaned, and my wife did that. The basement needed some reorganization after the extra stuff was removed. I did that.

And then there was the remaining issue of the Lost Sock bag back in my bedroom. 

I’d been holding out hope that during the moving and sorting of clothing, some of my Lost Socks would magically reappear from the drawers of the stepdaughters and boyfriend who were moving. One or two socks did show up, but some of those were actually refugees from behind the washer and dryer where my wife found them during a general house inspection.

After the joyous reunion of rediscovered socks, there remained a foot-tall bag of orphaned socks to be reconciled. Alas, the siblings of those socks remained missing. Some of them are cycling socks. Others are for running. There are also lonely-looking dress socks, whose forlorn stripes have no purpose without a kindred soul.

Somewhere in the universe, their sibling likely rests among strangers. That happens when six or eight people try living together. The melting pot of the laundry basket has no real rules. Orphaned socks are like DACA refugees living in America. They didn’t ask to be lost, and can only hold out hope they’ll one day really have a home.

One could argue the whole world is subject to such Sock Drawer Politics. Where do any of us really belong? We can either accept that we’re all orphaned socks or keep on treating each other like sock puppets worthy of abuse. Which will it be?

finishedstuffeddoll.jpgstuffedmonkey.jpg

That’s why I’ve held onto my refugee socks for months on end. My sentimental sympathy for orphaned socks is strong. I hate squandering resources and loathe giving up on something before its time. But with something so dispensable as socks, one has to accept that all socks abide the Dust to Dust model of existence here on earth. Ultimately they must be discarded unless you’re really into recycling socks.

They can be converted to other uses like the monkey sock above, but that is only delaying the inevitable. Some sport socks are so small they could never be used to create a sock monkey. One could hardly make a sock shrew out of them.

Sock it to me

And this fact is largely true: All socks wear out sooner or later except for Darned Tough Socks. My buddy swears by those, but that still doesn’t prevent them from becoming orphans if you live for a year with a band of 20-somethings for whom socks are just an annoying necessity to consider between games of Cards Against Humanity.

thumb_2895_product_photogra_qp_full.jpegEven my expensive and prized tall ThorLo socks turn soft and slack at the upper end sooner or later. The shorter socks don’t have that problem, but they don’t keep out snow when it is deep.

To their credit: my ThorLos usually last ten years or so. That’s 100 annums in Sock Years. They’ve long since exceeded their Return On Investment in that case.

I once numbered my ThorLos with a Sharpie to  keep them together in pairs. That action drew such teasing from my family members, I never tried it again. Besides, if I had a #1 and a #2 sock in the drawer, it never felt right to wear them together.

Mismatched and still useful 

The problem with some mismatched socks is that they really could function together if one did not care about the color. A pair of mismatched socks of the same brand and the same model––but different colors––should work just fine. But should you pair them up and continue using them that way? Hmmmm.

That would work out alright in running. But if you wear mismatched socks on the bike the comments would likely get snarky in a hurry. Cyclists are typically not a laid-back bunch when it comes to mis-matched or worn out attire. Even a pair of slightly threadworn cycling shorts can be subjected to cruel inspection in certain crowds. If they are so worn your ass crack or genitals show, no one wants to look at that. But even a bit of pilling and fading from excessive washing or wear is unacceptable in certain circles. Dress well and ride hard. Those are the rules. It’s a bit anal-retentive, but such is life in the Lycra crowd.

So the idea of heading out on a ride with one red sock and one blue one is simply not acceptable. Not unless you want to get ridden off the shoulder in disgust.

Making do

I’ve admittedly worn mismatched socks inside my running shoes. But it never feels quite right to do so. Something feels askew in the universe when you know your feet are covered in socks of different colors or textures. That is not a testimony yin and yang. It is less a question of balance as it is a confession of guilt over poor preparation.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been grateful to scrounge up a pair of socks from the bowels of my vehicle when I’ve forgotten to pack them in the gym bag for an afternoon run at some far-flung forest preserve. When you’re doing the requisite car change and find that you’ve neglected to bring the right equipment, gratitude for a simple pair of mismatched socks jammed down in the seats is a welcome sight. Who cares if they’re dirty or stink? This way they can go back in the wash after another six miles. They’re earned their keep for sure.

Don’t take it lightly

That’s why I don’t take it lightly when socks find their lonely way into the mismatched sock drawer. Typically it’s my own negligence that got them there. That layer of emotion calls up all my other flaws. The mismatched socks absorb my guilt like colorful remnants of bad memories. They recall the worst instincts and habits in our lives. Broken relationships. Political divides. Harsh family. Getting off track. Feeling lost or broken. Like mismatched socks. 

It all reminds me of a beautiful song by George Harrison titled Isn’t It a Pity. The words seem to cover so much about life, and possibly about the colorful world of lost socks, and the regrets that go with them.

Some things take so long, but how do I explain
When not too many people
Can see we’re all the same?
And because of all their tears
Their eyes can’t hope to see
The beauty that surrounds them
Isn’t it a pity

 

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Testing, testing

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

I’ve never been the best test-taker in the world. Part of my challenge is what my brothers and I call Artistic ADD. All through grade school and high school I struggled with the ability to pay attention. There were times when I could not make my brain focus on topics that were not highly stimulating. And algebra? Forget it. I’ve never used that again anyway. Formulas? Pretend math. They lacked real substance in my mind.

Distraction is both the product and price of an artistic mindset like mine. At one point my grades were so flat and average the high school guidance counselor sent me to some back office where I took some bogus test doing repetitive tasks in case I ever needed to go into factory work.So I purposely messed up on that test. The school must have been thinking, “Look, this kid is getting Cs and Ds in some of his classes. Maybe he should go the vocational route…” but I fooled them, didn’t I?

Years later I took a psychographic test at work and the results came back, “Chris does not excel at repetitive tasks.”

IMG_2203

Drawing by Christopher Cudworth, circa 1972

Meanwhile, what I really spent my time doing was drawing. All day. Every day. In class. Study halls. Draw, draw, draw. Yet I never took an art class in high school. Confining myself to whatever they felt like making me do seemed stupid.

So I painted birds and the things I really loved. Then I started selling the pictures I made. I’ve lost count of how many paintings I’ve sold. Still painting. Still selling.

Over the years, I’ve become much more disciplined and able to concentrate on important tasks related to work and life and such. But once in a while, a test of one kind or another comes along, and it just seems too stupid and trite to care. It’s like I’ve got Algebra Disease all over again. I can’t bring myself to care enough to concentrate and dig through the books and find the questions they want to hear.

That happened last summer after the Road Runners Club of America coaching clinic I hosted. Everything went well during class. I answered questions and led groups. Filled people in on things they did not know or with which they had no experience. I’ve been coaching all my life and thought I knew a thing or two about it.

Then I got an 81% on the goddamned test. I had to get an 85% on the test to pass. They said for $50 I could take it over again. But I knew I’d do no better or worse, get an even lower score. Second guessing gets you nowhere in life. So move on.

The questions weren’t hard. But when you actually question the material at hand, it’s hard to take the material literally. Call it ego, but midway through the course I thought I knew more about coaching and running than the people doing the teaching.

The course was centered around “made up” athletes about which we were supposed to answer questions and draw up hypothetical training solutions for them Maybe I overthought the whole thing. Or maybe I didn’t. Because when it came time to answer those questions I went with my gut instincts and got too many wrong to pass the test.

Like my wife said, “You know, everything they want you to say on the test is in the book. Just give them that. It’s easy.”

IMG_8421

Etching by Christopher Cudworth, circa 1977

But for me, it’s not. Is it possible that the brain of some people does not work that way? Is it possible that some sort of transitory factor shifts in my brain from the left (the artistic side) when asked to answer a question right (the practical side)?

That type of crossover or misapplied thinking cost me a few times in running races. Back in high school, I was leading a cross country race against a keen rival when I came to a point in the course where we were supposed to go straight down the track the second time around rather than doing another lap around the outside. But I’d forgotten.

I lost my 200 yard lead and narrowly missed catching him at the end. Obviously I was pissed. How was one supposed to remember that subtle change of course on an Away course after one shot at a course tour?

There had been no one at that straightway to send me the proper direction. So was it my spaciness that actually cost me the race, or was it instead a poorly managed race?

I’d passed the test of running faster than my opponent. That’s what races are supposed to be about, not how well you can remember the twists and turns and loops of the typical cross country course back in the 1970s. So I wound up running longer, and lost by four yards. A small percentage of the total race.

Just like my RRCA test. 

There was another time I was winning a college steeplechase race and the meet officials miscounted the laps. They shot the gun for the final lap when I was in the lead. So, I sprinted a quarter mile for the win. But as I approached the final few yards they started waving at me to run another lap. I just stopped instead. I’d passed the test they gave me.

Was it my fault they had the number wrong? 

During indoor track it was really difficult at times to keep track of the actual laps. Back when we ran on those tiny 176 yard or even 110 yard tracks it was something like 20 laps to the mile. You’d come past the starting line and they’d be flipping numbers back and forth. It left you wondering how many laps you really had left to run. My former college teammate laughs as he recalls a relay race in which I kicked like a madman and thought I’d won… only to hear from the officials there was another lap to run. “You should have seen your face,” he told me years later, laughing at the memory.

I’ve passed many a performance test over the years, but what still puzzles me are the moments when I’m not sure what the test is really all about. There is either and art or a science to knowing that. The problem is, I sometimes can’t tell one from the other..

So I just stay positive and act like that character Jeremy from the Yellow Submarine. “Yes! Ah, “yes” is a word with a glorious ring! A true universal, euphonious thing! Engenders embracing and chasing of blues! The very best word for the whole world to use!”

IMG_4121.JPG

Drawing by Christopher Cudworth, circa 1972. 

 

 

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Have you any dreams you’d like to share?

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Christopher Cudworth

IMG_1044.jpgLike so many people, there are periods when the dreams I have at night are so vivid they almost make my head spin when I wake up in the morning. Some of the dreams are clear and direct. You can tell the brain is processing some life event or challenge in abstract fashion.

Others evidence the fact that the mind is shedding stress or trying to untie the knots of existence. Dreams can be so vexing they drive people insane. The bible shares an interesting incident in which the prophet Daniel is called to interpret the dream of a king named Nebuchadnezzar whose dreams were keeping him awake at night. The king fears their meaning and hires all kinds of seers to figure them out. But no one was up to the task until Daniel arrived.

36 “This was the dream, and now we will interpret it to the king. 37 Your Majesty, you are the king of kings. The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory; 38 in your hands he has placed all mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds in the sky. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler over them all. You are that head of gold.

39 “After you, another kingdom will arise, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. 40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. 41 Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. 42 As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.

Whoa! The king was so relieved to find out what the dream meant that he placed Daniel in a position of authority. The story puts a whole twist on the notion of “when dreams come true.” Sometimes it means more to know how the mind works even when if it does not necessarily bring good news.

I once had a dream in which I was sitting out my senior season in cross country. I’d watch practices from the upper campus while my former running teammates ran their hearts out below. In the dream there was some kind of injury or other conditions keeping me back. But that was never specific. I just felt this angst of not running. And it felt like I was letting them all down. At the same time, there was a weird relief. I know, strange.

Crow's feet 1I’ve always been a person who wants to please others. Call it the Middle Child syndrome. At the point in life when I had that dream, I was likely in some position with family or work where I felt like I wasn’t meeting the self-imposed obligations rattling around my brain. That dream was my way of working through the nighttime angst.

It’s proof that these things we do, the running, riding and swimming, have deeper significance and literally do affect the way our minds work. Sometimes it’s clear and at other times, so abstract we wonder why we dream such things at all.

Yet it’s the waking dreams we have that rest at the front of conscious minds. We dream of success. Dream of love. Dream of financial security. Dream of having that book published. Dream of getting that promotion. We dream and dream on.

In the end, it’s the action we apply to our dreams that counts. In that moment when we make our waking dreams come true, there is a satisfaction that surpasses all others. If we apply a little gratitude at the same time, life itself is richer and more contemplative.

The ultimate dream in life is to be thankful for the ability to do your best, whatever that means. And working with others to make that happen. Have you any dreams you’d like to share?

How weird is this? As I sit finishing this blog at Graham’s 318 Coffee Shop, the famous song “Dream a Little Dream for Me” is playing. 

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