Norom (soft)

Badminton season has returned! I love this time of the year because it is finally cooling down. In the morning it gets down to a very cold temperature of 68 or so degrees. It has however reminded me of a problem I've been having the last couple of months. I'm becoming soft. I've put a little weight back on since returning from America this summer and lost a lot of the muscle I had. This is likely due to the fact that I pretty much stopped exercising and started eating a bit too much. The last couple of nights of playing has seen me bruise my heel by playing barefoot, have sore arm muscles from swinging the racket, and my hamstring tightened up from all the squatting and lunging required. This is all combined with a bit of a nice round gut to motivate me to start taking care of myself like I was last year. Maybe I should go ahead and label this what it is, a new years resolution in October. I doubt I'll actually accomplish it but for at least the next couple of weeks I'll try.


In other news, lately I've been pondering values and ideals. As we look around us, there is reality in the present. As we look forward, I'm sure all of us could come up with visions of a better tomorrow and what we could do to get there. At the same time, these ideal futures rarely come and if we are honest with ourselves, we can probably come up with a halfway decent guess about what the future possibility really is. This guess, of course, comes from reflecting on our past experiences. The real question for me though is how does one decide what their values in the present (the only point in time you have control over) are in a way that balances the ideal visions and hope for a better tomorrow with the pragmatic realization that the dream you have is just a vague hope. (By the way, that is not meant to be a depressing thing to say since that vague hope sometimes does become reality.) For example, I'm a pacifist and I readily admit that I cling strongly to an ideal, a hope for the future that I really don't believe stands a chance at arriving before Christ returns. Should that pragmatic realization change the way I perceive my pacifist values in the present time? I try not to let it but in other areas in my life, I think there might be room for such a thing.