The Will to Write and Read

Got a nice email from my oldest daughter in response to a packet of short journal pieces that I'd recently sent her. One of them had stirred a childhood remembrance of an attic workshop I had in a southside flat we rented when we first moved back here from Texas in the early '70s.

There's now a vacant lot where the house once stood, but its architecture and smells and character live on in the memory of one who was a very young child there.

Ah, the power of words to reconstitute those bygone days, the people and times and places which will live on in the half life of memory for as long as we have the words for them and the will to write and read them.

Which, as it happens, was precisely the point of the first entry among the ones that I'd sent her...

LPK
LiveJournal
6.1.2013 (a)

Upping the Reps

Just upped the reps, on the strength part of my conditioning routine, to 20. Wasn't sure that I'd actually be doing that in this latest iteration of my lifelong fitness quest.

And it's not like that number is huge. I remember hitting 30, then 50, then 60 of the straight-backed, all the way up, all the way down, chin and toes, only, touching the floor, military-style push ups.

It just seemed like something appropriately relegated to a life lived long ago, the life of a much younger man. Because, as I debated whether to do this, it came back so clearly, that feeling of being ready to challenge myself and, most importantly, of being able.

Maybe it's something that comes with age, this awareness of how easily these gains can be taken away, how quickly in the face of this sort of loss that resolve can wither, which fuels the doubt, the internal debate.

But I guess, for this day at least, I'll give the memory, and whatever is left of youthful resolve, its due. And so, 20 it is. And I'm not so sure that 30 is out of reach either...

LPK
LiveJournal
6.1.2013 (b)