As you beeline towards your goal, watch the periphery for opportunities that may help you skip steps to that goal, or take you off to another goal that is even greater than the one you had in mind before.
There is no real path. Just an infinite number of possible points of opportunity connected together by a web of potential paths.
Failure on one leg of your journey is far from ending your journey.
The biceps curl is overdone and over-hyped. I do them, as part of a total body workout, but there’s a more effective arm-buster.
Now, I don’t support hitting arms before you’ve done the Exercise Triumvirate: Lunges, Squats, and Deadlifts (LSD). It’s great to see more and more people joining the Triumvirate as we get smarter about what exercises work for total fitness, and which don’t.
But, as for getting gorilla arms, the best exercise is the triceps extension, seated or lying down.
Why? Because the triceps are the biggest muscle group in the arm, they take up the most space. So if you do some high weight sets mixed with low weight sets, after a few weeks, you are sure to look like you can lead all the women folk to safety.
As for developing the mind of a leader… that is a different regiment altogether.
Should California residents be required to shut off the water during their soaping sessions to conserve water, and need there be an Office of Water Use monitoring this? And should there be Water Credits given to each household, which can be traded with other citizens, for those who need longer showers because they still want to live like an American or perhaps for the truly filthy?
And should there be exemptions for women, who need to wash their long hair, and what would the minimum hair length be? or if they wanted to take baths instead, specifically bubble baths, and should there be regulation of this by a Bubble Bath crew.
BAM BAM, “Surprise inspection! How long is your hair, Miss? Don’t touch your hair please, just stand up so we can measure. Don’t worry, we’re professionals, this will only take a second. Hey, Joe, where’s the hair metric scanning recorder? What? Oh, we don’t have one? None in the truck? No biggie, we’ll have another brought over from another crew. Til then we’ll have a seat and wait. What’s that you’re reading there? Cosmo, huh? Well, don’t mind us, we’ll just have a smoke here. It’s medicinal, don’t worry. We all have bad backs from doing this job. State jobs, you know, they can get rough. Wow, that’s a big tub. How many people you think we can get in there?”
Should California residents be required to shut off the water during their soaping sessions to conserve water, and need there be an Office of Water Use monitoring this? And should there be Water Credits given to each household, which can be traded with other citizens, for those who need longer showers because they still want to live like an American or perhaps for the truly filthy?
And should there be exemptions for women, who need to wash their long hair, and what would the minimum hair length be? or if they wanted to take baths instead, specifically bubble baths, and should there be regulation of this by a Bubble Bath crew.
BAM BAM, “Surprise inspection! How long is your hair, Miss? Don’t touch your hair please, just stand up so we can measure. Don’t worry, we’re professionals, this will only take a second. Hey, Joe, where’s the hair metric scanning recorder? What? Oh, we don’t have one? None in the truck? No biggie, we’ll have another brought over from another crew. Til then we’ll have a seat and wait. What’s that you’re reading there? Cosmo, huh? Well, don’t mind us, we’ll just have a smoke here. It’s medicinal, don’t worry. We all have bad backs from doing this job. State jobs, you know, they can get rough. Wow, that’s a big tub. How many people you think we can get in there?”
The outrage over Cecil the lion’s death is because of the scarcity rule….the human condition is to value less what is in excess and value more what is scarce. Just look at political entitlements or community involvement. Both are too low to meet the demand of the many many people in this world, because, as funny as it sounds, there are just too many people to care about.
Imagine living in a small town, with a hundred people. You and your community would address those people who aren’t doing so well, wouldn’t you?
Just think, if we could factory farm a warehouse full of Cecils, would anyone be thinking twice about eating them on their burgers?
If this sounds strange, then there’s more than a scarcity rule we should be applying in judging the deaths of animals.
I am proud of many of our accomplishments as human beings
We are smart….at least, we are clever. And if we are clever, then we should always remember that we cannot tame nature. And if we abuse it, and manipulate it, and modify it, so as to fit our liking, for our pleasures, or even our needs, then we must realize that it could violently, or deceptively slowly, transition into something we did not expect, and hurt us, individually, or as a society.
Nature is not our friend. It is our home. And a living, breathing thing. And it will bite back.
Respect your Home. Your electricity comes from somewhere and has a cost. Use it mindfully. Your gasoline comes from somewhere and burning it has a cost. Use it mindfully. Your food comes from somewhere, and it has a cost, especially the animals, because their lives have been sacrificed. Choose your diet while respecting them and their environment.
How would you rate your lifestyle on its respect of your Home? On a scale of 1-10. Ten being perfect, an exact equilibrium of give and take between you and the environment.
You know that a 10 rating for humanity is probably impossible. And probably impossible for you, too.
But shrugging off responsibility as caretaker of our Home, because we can’t achieve a perfect relationship is careless. And in the end, it will leave us alone, like a single person who wants the perfect partner, and so he dies malnourished and alone. Just as we will if we don’t face the consequence of our relationship with our Home.
Disrespecting our relationship occurs when we do not strictly recycle our plastics and by overfishing our oceans, which throws our water ecosystem, and therefore the world’s ecosystem out of equilibrium.
We ignore our relationship with our Home by eating animals raised in factories with giant cesspools, whose heavy antibiotic regiments leak into our environment and create drug-resistant super bacteria, and whose fertilizers run off and cause algal blooms to neutralize life around our river and ocean coastlines.
Our technology can help us. It may give us meat raised in labs, and a solar powergrid powering our homes and vertical urban farms that don’t need food raised on factory farms, trucked across the country on highways filled with a steady stream of greenhouse gas-producing tractor trailers.
Can we cut back our consumption and make mindful choices in our diet while we improve our technology to replace our current inefficiencies? I think we can. Because, really, we have no choice, in order to maintain life as we know it in our Home, for our children, and for their children.
arabedrossian.org 