The Crowley Chronicles

One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is learn to play chess.

I’ve started playing against Scott, my brother-in-law, at Sound Chess.  It’s a chess-by-email website that I can’t recommend enough.  (You actually play on the website, and it sends an email to your opponent that it’s their turn to move.

And now, after a bit of wondering what to do with my Facebook time, I’ve resolved to invest it in training with the Chessmaster program.  It offers lessons with Josh Waitzkin (star of “Searching For Bobby Fisher,” which I reread in the airplane on the way over here) as well as a virtual, ‘matched opponent’ to practice playing against.  That’s kind of cool.

The thing is, now that I’m being honest with myself, I wonder if I have what it takes.  It’s a lot of concentration, and I’m finding it hard.  I like to think that I can train it the way I can train running.

I guess we’ll see.

So, my two months off are winding down, and I’m trying to cram all the things in that I didn’t get done in the last seven or so weeks:  namely, I’m trying to exercise and read.

I was supposed to go for a bike ride today, as part of the ‘a little bit every day’ program.  But I didn’t.  I jut didn’t have the time, not to mention the energy.  We’ve started turning ‘the extra room’ into ‘the kids’ room.’  The last couple of days, that’s meant painting two walls (yellow and green) and putting up a border.

Today it meant buying carpet (the wall-to-wall kind), moving everything we could out of the room, moving everything still in the room to one end, laying the carpet down, moving everything back to the other side, working some more with the carpet, and then, just when you thought you were finished, we have to arrange the new room. . . and arrange the rest of the apartment’s furniture to reflect the presence of a ‘kids’ room.’

So, yeah, I didn’t go for my bike ride today.  But I don’t think you can say I didn’t exercise.

Today, I made the leap.  I deleted my Facebook account.  Of course, I didn’t really delete it.  I requested that they delete it, and, in fourteen days, they say they will.  I’m not sure why they have to wait so long, but I’m glad to be out.

Now I just wonder what I’ll do for fifteen minutes every day after I check my email?  Maybe I could start writing email.

Or just plain start writing.  We’ll see.

As a part of my drive to do the things that are important to me with my time, I’m in the process of leaving Facebook.  After all, it doesn’t count as important to me.

I’m wondering, though, if this blog counts as important?  I mean, I think I get more out of my offline journaling, and I sometimes wish I weren’t blogging under my own name.  I don’t know.  Anybody read this?  Anybody have an opinion?

I suppose it really ought to be the first step in becoming who you want to be: understanding who you are now.  But, well, I don’t think I have been.

There have been a few reminders lately that I’m not as smart as I think I am.  Whether it’s not being able to focus as long as I’d like (for more than one game of chess) or remember what I’ve read–I mean content, not titles–in the begining of the month, I’m alarmed to find out that I’m not who I think I am.

The last time I can remember having a shock like this was my first year in Germany as an exchange student.  Having a great circle of friends at home, I thought I was a pretty sociable person.  Going to a completely new country, I realized that I wasn’t good at making contact. . . I was good at conversing with the people who made contact with me.

I guess I should start working on this stuff, eh?

Two hundred and forty-seven, it turns out.  If you were wondering how much I’d gain in the U.S., the answer is three and a half pounds.

But there’s more to the story than that.  I started out motivated to keep my weight constant and went either jogging or biking (nearly) every day, alternating.  I was pumped and I was expanding my runs regularly, powering up hills (by ‘powering,’ I mean, of course, jogging in a plodding manner, but not walking) and I spent more time on the bike (dad’s, it’s a nice bike) than I had in the last year.

And, all this time, I’d hop on the scale regularly.  My weight was constant.

Then there was that last week at home.  Wendy was there, I was responsible for Leon in the morning, and it was hot.  There was never a really good time to sneak away and run or jog and, to be honest, once you’ve missed one day, the next is even easier to miss.

My point?  Well, those three and a half pounds all came from the last week when I stopped exercising.  I guess I should have realized that, if I was running five and more miles three times a week and remaining constant that I couldn’t cut it out and expect not to gain.

Whatever.  My mom’s a really good cook, and this way I can say I brought something of her cooking back with me.

Have you heard of StumbleUpon? It’s a browser add-on for Firefox (and maybe more) that leads you to new websites that it thinks you’ll be interested in. Learning from how you react (thumbs up, thumbs down) to the websites it shows you, it learns what interests you and what doesn’t. It’s so addictive that I had to remove it from my computer. I just wasn’t getting anything else done.

That’s the kind of time-management post this is going to be.

Originally, I wanted to rail about other people. You know, the ones who tell me that they’d go running too, if they had time. Or, yeah, they’ve always wanted to learn an instrument, if they could find the time. People like that make me crazy for two reasons, one imagined, one probably not. The imagined reason is the little tantrum I throw in my head whenever I hear the phrase ‘if I only had the time.’ I want to scream that I don’t have any more hours in my day than they do, I want to smack them and tell them that I have to make the time by not doing other things, like watching TV or hosting big dinner parties.

The real reason, I think, is different. I think I get so upset at people who I think aren’t managing their time well because I know that I’m not managing mine. You’d think that I’d be more tolerant, adopting a ‘well, I certainly know how hard it is attitude,’ but I don’t. I get furious. So furious, in fact, that the first draft of this post was an attack on those people.

And, a little bit, I like to attack things like Facebook and StumbleUpon. But they aren’t the problem, either. The problem is my life is out of my control.

I’m not talking about living-in-Iran lack of control, or even about I’m-married-I-have-no-say-in-what-I-do-ha-ha lack of control. I’m talking about nobody being in control of my life. There’s nobody who says that, rather than play the piano I should surf the Internet with StumbleUpon. There’s nobody who makes me waste half an hour dragging my feet and moping about how I don’t really want to jog each time before I go jogging. There’s nobody who makes me read old Dilbert and FoxTrot comic books when I could be learning something I want to learn.

The problem is, I’m not controlling my life.

Arete, I think, has to mean moving your life in the direction of quality. What does that mean? Who knows. Let’s say it this way: Arete has to mean at once refusing to be satisfied with who you are and moving towards the person you want to be.

I think that second definition is one we can work with. And learning to control my own life is going to be a big part of that. After all, just as what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, what doesn’t bring me closer to my goals wastes my time.

I’ve been formulating some thoughts, trying to put into words the ideas I’ve had on time, timing and arete.  I’m not ready.

As though to spur me on, I found this is a book called Running and Being by Dr. George Sheehan.  He begins by talking about people who live either in the past or in the future, and then adds this:

But for those active in mind and heart and body, the child and the poet, the saint and the athlete, the time is always now.  They are eternally present.  And present with intensity and participation and commitment.  They have to be.  When the athlete, for instance, turns his attention from the decision to be made this second and every second, he invites disaster. . . Only the now exists for him.

And the saint, for all his talk of heaven and the hereafter knows that everywhere is right here, that all of time is right now, and that every man exists in the person in front of him.  He knows that every instant he must choose and continue to choose among the infinite possibilities of acting–and being.  He has no time to think on the future.

[. . .]

For such a man, Perfection Past is no temptation. . . Their characteristic fall from grace is in the contemplation of future triumphs.  Heave, perhaps, or a masterpiece, or a world’s record.  No athlete ever lived, or sat or poet for that matter, who was content with what he did yesterday, or would even bother thinking about it.  Their pure concern is the present.

Why should we common folk be different?  Are we not all poets and saints and athletes to some degree?

You can bet that, when my thoughts on Arete and time and timing appear here.  (Soon, I hope!)  There will be an emphasis on the present!

I invite comments.

After a few discussions on ‘quality’ and ‘living quality’ with my students and friends, I realized that I had a problem.  People already know–or think they know, which is the same thing–what ‘quality’ is.  What’s needed is a new term, for a new concept.  So, still borrowing from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” I want to introduce a new term for the old thing I was talking about:

Arete

It’s Robert Pirsig’s word, in the sense that he referred to it in his book.  But, really, it’s a Greek word meaning ‘excellence,’ because, apparently, the Greeks would apply it to men (and, one hopes, women) who lived excellence.

And, after all, when I’m thinking about living quality, what I’m thinking about is living excellence.  I’m thinking about Arete.

It’s a bit amazing to know your weight in pounds. I was okay thinking I weighted a hundred and ten kilograms because, well, a hundred and ten isn’t that many, is it? But, in the interest of scientifically disproving the assumption that you gain weight in America, I weighed myself the second day we were here.

You know now what the result was:  I weigh 243 pounds(!)  I was 190 when I graduated high school, and just about 200 when I went to the Army.  So, yeah, the 243 is a pretty shocking number.

A little side-note: It’s actually unusual to be able to weigh yourself at my parents’ house.  Until the girls (now women) all moved out, my mother refused to allow a scale in the house.  She was–probably rightly–afraid that scales had a bad influence on women.  They only picked on up to help my father lose weight.  Funny, eh?