Now that I’m working out semi-regularly, I have had to deal with the issue of time. No, not the time it takes to exercise. The clock on my iPhone and the timer on the treadmill offer plenty of measurement for that kind of time.
What I am referring to instead, is how to occupy my brain so that it gets as good a workout as my body.
Initially, I tried the Shuffle feature on my phone. It would dutifully serve up a selection of songs from my impossibly big song selection, something like 10 straight days or so of nonstop music.
The closest I got to feeling inspired to slog through my routine was some greatest hits from the 1980s. But it was hit and miss, largely because some of those songs are so slow and almost painful that I have come to realize that losing Rickey’s number wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
It wasn’t until this weekend that I happened on my perfect workout accompaniment. I had completely forgotten that at one time I had purchased a couple books on Audible.com and even though I have changed phones, these treasures have continued to load onto each one anew.
I initially thought a Jimmy Buffett book would work, a little escapism during my many mile journey to nowhere on the old treadmill. If I thought hard enough, I could perhaps imagine traveling down a tropical beach somewhere, rather than being in Planet Fitness in Lake Forest Park.
Instead, I went with A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It will totally bend your mind like origami, largely because Bill has a great way of telling a story that makes science fascinating.
Here’s a snippet from the opening of the book”
“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”
And how about this little gem?
“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”
Imagine this for a moment. You are only here because of what can only be called happenstance in the reproductive cycles of your ancestors and the fact that atoms willingly combined with one another to create you, not only you, but a living, breathing you.
One misstep along the way and you don’t exist. An ancestor didn’t run fast enough and ended up being breakfast. Your great-great-great grandfather Ackbar was really homely and didn’t get laid by your great-great-great grandmother. Your parents didn’t get it on one night – the night you were conceived. Any single interruption along the way and you don’t exist.
It’s really freaking amazing that 1) we’re even here, and 2) we know we’re here.
Now, I know that some of you believe that we are creations of a Supreme Being. I’m not going to go into that here because quite frankly, we all have the right to believe what we want to believe and we’re all on our own journeys. Besides, no one is going to know if they were right or wrong until it’s too late to tell anyone else.
Whether you’re a divine creation or the end product of a night of wild passion between two complete strangers, the fact that you are here at all is a true miracle. Not even of the religious kind, but of the medical kind. At some point, just before you became you, a single sperm had to miraculously hook up with a fertile egg at just the right time. One moment you weren’t there, the next moment you were.
At some point, this process will reverse and you will be here one moment, then gone the next. You’ll be laid to rest or baked until you’re well done in a very large Easy-Bake Oven and all those billions of atoms will stop being you and go off to be something, or someone, else.
Freaky, huh? As laws of physics have shown, all the matter that was created here on earth is still here. There’s been no new atoms. Rather, everything has assembled and disassembled time and time again, creating new versions of life, one of these versions being you.
As Bill points out in his book, this unique combination of atoms has never existed before and never will again, ever. You’re it. You are the only you that will ever be on this planet. Eventually you’ll be broken up into pieces and others will end up with some of your atoms.
This is where it gets amazing. We all think we’re so bloody different, but in truth, we’re not. We may spend our whole lives trying to identify the differences between ourselves and others, but never really take the time to realize that we’re all in this together, we’re all using recycled parts from someone else’s Lego set, and someday, we’ll just disassemble and the whole process will begin again.
In the meantime we fret and worry about what tomorrow will bring rather than just enjoying what we have at this very moment. “Now” is the only thing we have that is guaranteed.
Still, we spend the bulk of our lives consumed by our past or planning for that someday that may never come, never taking the time to realize that Now is a freaking miracle for each and every one of us, a rare space in time when we are here and accounted for and fully alive.
I am quickly learning to love this minuscule sliver of time we have. I hope you’ll look at it as the miracle it is and appreciate it as well for Now is all we got. Everything else is just a distraction.
In the Emerald City, in the here and now, fully present and accounted for,
– Robb