Self-Improvement

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

            –Ralph Waldo Emerson

The picture above is from the classic 1980 horror film, The Shining. In the family portrait, patriarch Jack Nicholson, who has been isolated with his family for the winter, is showing signs that he is cracking under the pressure. By this point, many of us, too, are getting restless. The weather is warming up, and the activities we normally associate with spring and early summer are greatly curtailed, if not completely halted. As we search for ways to entertain ourselves in these difficult times, I have a suggestion: work on yourself. Anyone who is my age has probably experienced times in their adult lives where they wished they had more time for self-improvement. Well, now you have the time. Take advantage of it.

I’ve always been a bit fanatical on trying to improve myself in one regard or another. In some ways, that’s what the title of this blog, Take Five, is all about. Psychologist Carl Jung once wrote that men mature later than women, but that at some point, the various threads of their life begin to come together. The variety of things I have done in my life have all enjoyed a resurgence in recent weeks as I have sought ways to entertain myself and burn up some excess energy. Perhaps this means that I’m finally starting to mature. I have also discovered the value of YouTube videos to teach almost anything.

Even before this thing began, I was running or walking every day and doing lots of push-ups and other exercises while trying to stave off weight gain. I’ve taken that up a notch in recent weeks by adding a 5K time trial once a week. I mapped out a 3.1-mile course along a rocky ridge in a park near my house, and I run it for time once a week. There are two brutal hills leading to the top of the ridge, and I still have to walk partway up those hills, but the times are improving steadily. Even the downhill sections offer challenges, as I discovered last week when I tripped while trying to gain time on the steep finishing stretch. The trouble with falling while running downhill, as any trail-runner will attest, is that your body doesn’t stop when it hits the ground. You tend to bounce, slide, and roll down the hill before coming to a stop. Then you get up, check for injuries, wipe off the blood, and look around to make sure no one saw how stupid you were. Obviously, at my age, any physical activities come with a law of diminishing returns—my body won’t allow me to do what I once did, and I’ll only get slower as I age. So I understand that I’ll never run the 5K under 15:00 again, but the time trials give me a goal and a reason to run intervals and hill workouts each week.

Another thing I’ve always done is read and write for a while each day. In addition to working on my novels, I usually find myself reading three books at a time. I am currently reading one about the craft of writing, called, The First Five Pages. It focuses on the importance of the beginning of novels but also gives great tips on how to improve and streamline your writing. I always have a fun and relaxing novel going; right now I am reading a John Sandford novel featuring his detective character, Lucas Davenport. Davenport operates out of Minneapolis and often includes locations that are now familiar to us. Finally, I usually have a history book going at the same time. I just finished a history of Wisconsin and am now reading one called Wisconsin Frontier, by a River Falls native. I actually read that one years ago while researching my first novel, but picked it up again last week when I noticed that the dedication was to the town of River Falls. I am enjoying learning a little about my surrounding area through these books. In addition to reading, I have been trying to beef up my vocabulary by adding three new words to my repertoire each day. I make index cards and quiz myself periodically until I reach the point where I can own these words and use them in my writing. Hopefully, this work will help me abstain from solecism and pleonasms, use stronger words as succedaneums for flaccid and enervated vocabulary, and result in prose with a more refulgent quality. We’ll see.

I have also added two new diversions to my daily routine. For the first time in fifteen years or so, I have started playing guitar again. It took several weeks to get beyond the finger blisters and develop new callouses on my fingers, but the muscle memory and latent music theory is starting to return. It was almost like learning from scratch at first, with all of the frustrations of being a new musician. I’m now at the point, though, where I can learn new songs and try to develop better techniques by watching YouTube films. (And I thought they only had cute videos about cats and babies!) In particular, I am trying to improve my finger-picking, and I’ve found some great films about that skill. I am seeing some progress by practicing for about an hour a day. In addition to the things I have done in the past, I have taken up golf as well. I’ve always been terrible at golf, but I love being out on a course. As an 11-year-old caddy, I developed an appreciation for the beauty of golf courses, especially early in the morning when the rising sun is glinting off of the dew. The cost of the game and my inability to hit that damn ball consistently, however, have kept the opportunities to enjoy such scenes to a minimum. But I have tried to play once every 3 or 4 years just to keep my game sharp. I mentioned earlier that I now live right on a golf course, and I have scavenged nearly 200 golf balls from the woods during the winter months. Now, with time on my hands, I take a basket of balls to the nearby park and hit to my heart’s content. Ben, who was on his golf team in college, has showed me a few helpful things, and I have studied some YouTube videos to pick up some more tips. After running each day, I stop at the park and practice these new techniques for about an hour. Here, too, I am seeing some progress, although I have not as yet tried my skills on the actual course.

As the American writer Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” Self-improvement has been one of the core values of Western Civilization since the days of the Roman Empire. Rather than bemoaning the fact that we can’t be doing all of the things we would like to do, this is a great opportunity to learn something new or improve some aspect of our lives. I have encouraged Kathleen to take up gymnastics or triathlons, but she has thus far rejected most of my suggestions. She has, however, started reading Tolstoy’s 1400-page War and Peace (Seriously). As for myself, I was thinking about learning how to fish. Or perhaps some artistic pursuit, such as oil paints. Esperanto has always intrigued me . . .

Update: In a previous blog, I mused about the possibility of floating on waterways from River Falls to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Well, the other day I read about a worker on a Mississippi River bridge who had his hard-hat fall from his head and float away on the water. It had his name and contact information, but, of course, he never expected to see it again. Recently someone found his hat and called him about it. The amazing thing about this story is that the man found the hat on the coast of Ireland. The adventurous chapeau had apparently ridden the current down the Mississippi to the Gulf, and, from there, caught a ride on the Gulf Stream before winding up on the Emerald Isle. Pretty cool.