A man on his owns knows that he is best advised to leave his dumbbell neighbors alone. But let him join a political party, and he fantasizes that he has the right and the power to tell everyone on the block what to do.
That is the problem with age and wisdom—it merely shows you how helpless you are. The wiser you become, the more you learn to keep your mouth shut, until eventually the grave silences you forever.
I hope the competition will resume, and if it does, you must not think that running or throwing or jumping is frivelous. The games were once your fellow Olympians answer to war – competition, not conquest. Now, they must be your answer.
People are upset. They know something is wrong. But they don’t know what. The real explanation is too complicated. They won’t sit still for it. So, they look for scapegoats – the rich…the banks…the Chinese.
Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don’t apologize for it. They don’t hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they’re proud of it… announcing that they ‘saved civilization,’ or some such claptrap.
The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight. Soon, a person’s situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance.
I think people can handle 150 to 200 miles a week. But something has to give somewhere. If he’s a student, how’s he going to study? He may be at the age of chasing and courtship, and that’s an important form of sport and recreation, too.
So it’s a matter of fitting your current practices to fit the event and the individual. See, what’s good for you might not be worth a darn for the next guy.
