Daily Archives: January 29, 2011

True Courage #Egypt

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True Courage #Egypt

Defying the curfew in Cairo, Egypt, January 29, 2011

Boxers know a thing or two about courage.  Walking into the ring to risk injury or worse is never an easy thing.  Yet boxers also train long and hard to mitigate the risks of the ring in their favor.


The hundreds of thousands of people who have taken to the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez, however, have not trained themselves for battle. Yet, they have risen on mass, young and old, men and women, professional and worker, student and pensioner to demand an end to over thirty years of oppressive rule.

This is one of those extraordinary moments —  such as the fall of the Berlin Wall when we must all stand as one to support the courageous people of such places as Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen in their bid for democratic freedom.  We must let them know that they are not alone — and that we honor and cherish true courage where we find it.

Information and live video can be found here, here and here.

To tweet encouragement add the following to your message #egypt, #jan25, #jan26, #cairo or #alexandria

We should all help to shine the light on a very dark night of oppression.

The world keeps on spinning

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The world keeps on spinning

As pressed for time as my life is it’s nice to take some moments to do nothing but drift.  By drift I do not necessarily mean gorking-out in front of the TV or getting memorized by online catalog sales.  No, drift time are those moments when the imagination can soar — such as going for a walk where you let your “feet do the walking” instead of taking yourself on a straight line from A to B.

It’s those opportunities for shaking up your tree that lets you take-in things you might not ordinarily see.  Say walking along and only observing the second floors of buildings.  There are some wonderous things to see!  Oddly carved gargoyles, balconies to no where, hand painted signs, and an assortment of drapes and window dressings that ranges from austere Modernism to Rococo to the merely ordinary.

So too with exercising.  You can have solid morning calisthenics, classes you take, routes for your daily run, sacrosanct Yoga DVD’s, and for boxers the set-list of rounds for each type of boxing training plus the time you spend with your trainer.  What’s nice is to spin yourself around by trying something a little bit different.  This sort of drift time let’s your body find its way to where you want to be.  That can mean an entirely new route for your run, yoga poses you never thought you could achieve, or in the boxing gym, a rhythm to your heavy bag or speed-bag work you didn’t know you had.

I guess the point is that we all need to step out of the ordinary so that we can find new ways of doing things.  Whether its writing a story backwards, taking a stab at creating an oddly shaped pot on the potter’s wheel or spinning a globe with your kids and inventing stories about what life would be like if you all lived in those places.  Believe me, nothing earth shattering will happen if you let things unfold without having structured it.  What you might find is a feeling of relaxation and calm that otherwise alludes you as your go about your overly busy day — at least that’s what I’ve found when I remember to give myself the time.