Meet my Friend Horizon
thanks cousin G
EXERCISE / CLEARING OUR MINDS
For those of you who read my newsletter regularly, my transitions between topics from day to day and sometimes within the same post might be disquieting at times. For those of you who are EXTREMELY LOYAL readers, today’s photo is the first time I reused an image for TWO DIFFERENT stories.
The weather in Minnesota, especially as we approach winter can present a lot of challenges to finding serenity, purpose, and challenge. My mind can be a busy place and maintaining a clear mind is hard work for me. While I do not use it much anymore, for a while I nurtured a Twitter account. At first, it seemed like a way to “be connected” with my wife and children. Twitter was a virtual place where my entire immediate family had an account. Over time, two of my sons have mostly stopped using it and I have largely joined them. My wife has always been a triumph of moderation and seems to manage almost any new activity with an amazing serenity. As time went by, I began to feel the toxic effects of being on the platform. I would “take a break” from it at times. What I eventually came to understand very clearly through my behaviors was that (1) I would read some posts (2) feel the urge to like them, re-tweet them or respond to them began welling up, and (3) finally, after replying OCCASIONALLY, I was overcome with the urge to DELETE the reply. I think that taking a break from Twitter has allowed me to contemplate why I was doing it. Was it a healthy way to spend my time?
While I have not taken the final step (as I did with Facebook over a decade ago), I expect that I will delete my Twitter account at some point or at least drastically change how I use it. I have concluded that given there are 1440 minutes in a day, Twitter is not a healthy priority place to spend some of that precious time with. There are ample interruptions in our daily lives. I hope that no one takes this as lecturing on how to live. I have found what I just described to ring true FOR ME and I expect that other people are very different. This is just an observation to post about today. My mother used to frequently say, there are only so many hours in the day. My Mom, like my wife is today, was a triumph of moderation and I sometimes wish I had gotten a bit more of that in myself.
The conundrum of how we spend our time, in my opinion, should be embraced as a wonderful gift. How lucky we are to have options. Many years ago I purchased a treadmill and it often functioned as a coatrack in the early years. The past five years it has become an integral part of my life and that has been unexpected. This brings us to the title of today’s post. If you look at the photo, the model of my treadmill is Horizon hence my corny photo and title of the day.
Horizon is a very good name for a treadmill as we typically might just stare straight ahead. It is worthwhile to imagine what we see or let our minds travel elsewhere. In my case, while I think I move at a brisk pace, no one would mistake it for running. I do some interval changes of speed but am most focused on getting my heart rate up and into a training zone and then just keeping it in a good workout range. This frees me to do something with my time while going nowhere. One day I will post about multi-tasking and the misnomer it really is at least when it applies to a human. I will go no further here than to say that the research to date points toward a result that when humans believe they are multi-tasking, they are merely doing two things poorly.
Back to the story. The longer I have owned my treadmill, the more I value it. If I were to give advice to someone buying a treadmill, it would be unusual as my thought processes often are. There is not much to maintaining a treadmill except to lubricate the belt occasionally. My treadmill has a particular service interval and it will flash a message when it is time to lubricate the belt. The message is based upon how much the treadmill has been used. Service reminders are handy, albeit crude. Once I became a regular user of the treadmill I bought a larger container of the belt lubricant and put a piece of paper next to it. I write down whenever I lubricate the treadmill AND THEN ADD a date when I can predict that I MIGHT have to lubricate it again! Goals are good and when I miss them by an appreciable margin, it means I probably need to use my treadmill a bit more than I think I am using it. As I described, when I first got my treadmill I did not use it very much. I think I was just proud to tell others I had a treadmill. Not that different than my analogy in a prior post about having a complex oven with lots of bells and whistles or a really cool stand mixer I am afraid. The shinier the object, the less likely it will be used for many.
I eventually transitioned to a person who used his treadmill A LOT. It has become a wonderful thing to have as sometimes I just want to think or be inspired. I have a cousin who I will call P. In many ways, P and I are like-minded. P owns a treadmill and I imagine uses his quite a lot. I visited P a while back on a wonderful visit. He seems to enjoy the rural life he has embraced even more in retirement. He loves to mow his grass and told me an engaging story. He described that when he is mowing, it clears his mind. The result is he is clear-headed and can think about projects for the future. He joked that his wife, M, might shriek oh no when he returns from cutting the grass. P might say “M, while I was mowing I had an idea!”. The treadmill has become that place for me. As I related earlier, I rarely test the top speed of my treadmill or raise the incline as if I were scaling a mountain. Rather I choose an interval program and work to keep my heart in a good working range and get an aerobic workout. I think that the treadmill for me, especially when the chill of winter comes storming into Minnesota is a great diversion. In fact, P has a brother I will call G. G has finished multiple marathons and I imagine that for him, running was always a thing that accompanied the peace of self you get when you are exercising at a comfortable and sustainable pace.
I have adapted the place in front of the treadmill and then attach my Chromebook with a bungee cord for my workouts. I often read some news or listen to a podcast and become inspired. This is the place where I clear my mind and often find the inspiration of what I want to learn next. This is the closest I come in real life to multi-tasking. My treadmill is a bit of a modern workstation for me. While I have not yet written about my SmartHome exploits, I maintain a smart speaker, a supplemental BlueTooth speaker, voice controls for the television normally in front of me, my Chromebook which is intrinsically connected to my Pixel phone which allows me to respond to texts with a regular keyboard. I also wear a smartwatch. All of this technology works together (sometimes it doesn’t) and I just like the fun of it all as a hobby. This reminds me of a wonderful after Saturday tennis get-together. A good friend of mine I will call D asked me “how the heck do you write those long texts?”. Once I revealed that I HARDLY EVER text from my phone I think he was relieved that I wasn’t doing it from a phone keyboard. When I see youngsters texting as if they are typing I am always amazed. I realize now I have taken a shortcut that lets me text at higher speeds without resorting to contorting my thumbs. All this interconnection is fun for me and it lets me explore my SmartHome hobby at the same time. Enough about the SmartHome stuff as that is a post for another day.
This post was about my treadmill and how it takes me to a different place where I can learn new things and think about what I might want to learn or write about next. Now that I am writing regularly I am grateful that my treadmill helps me discover what to write about next. Here is our tune for the night. If you are new to the treadmill or are trying to get motivated to walk or run in the cold, here are two songs (A & B) that can get you pumped up. Both of them work for me occasionally. Hope to see you on Thursday. As ALWAYS, I would like to hear what you don’t like as the aim is to improve. Have a great evening.
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