Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
Get 7 for Sunday in your inbox. āĀ Subscribe here.
This issue isĀ https://7forsunday.com/11
December 18, 2022 ā #11 →
Movement →
The future of functional fitness is an evolution into functional movement.
We see this already in the explosion of more complex movement practices like parkour happening all over the world and being adopted slowly by the mainstream fitness world. Organisms are not machines, and the era of training them like machines will give way to an age of treating them like organisms, leading to longer health-spans, fewer injuries and even greater potential.
~ Dan Edwardes from, The Future of Functional Fitness
slip:4udate1.
Thanks, Dan! Thanks for the teaching, for the training, for conversation, for asking good questions, and for just being the sort of person who keeps showing up. Showing up publicly, sure. More importantly though, showing up to do the hard work of self-improvement. And for showing your work.
É
Consistency →
If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.
~ Maria Popova
slip:4a1054.
Frustration andā¦ →
Every once in a while, when someone finds out that Iām a writer who dabbles in programming, theyāll ask me: So, is programming hard? And I usually answer the same way. āāHardā is the wrong word,ā Iāll say. āItās not so much that itās hard. āItās that itās frustrating.ā
~ Clive Thompson from, Programming Isnāt Hard ā But Itās Frustrating
slip:4ugipo1.
This article is sublime.
Because Thompson isn’t a professional programmer, there are two more parts to programming which he hasn’t discovered: First, that your mistakes inevitably come back to bite you in the ass. Second, you will forever face the engineering dilemma of having to wrestle with balancing good execution (does the bridge carry the weight over the river, or do people die) with project parameters (the budget is $5, it has to be shiny, and we need it next week.)
The soulāsucking frustration which Thompson rightly identifies is very real. Also real: Shit catching fire (literally and/or figuratively) in the wee hours of the morning requiring one to fix one’s own mistakes made, or shortcuts taken, years earlier. After a decade of that, one grows tired of explaining one’s reasons and process (not that anyone would listen.) And after a few decades of all that, one will understand why I sometimes say, as I approach losing my temper: Please do not meddle in the ways of wizards, for we are quick to anger and you are tasty with ketchup. It’s nothing you did; It’s nothing personal. It’s simply that Programming is terrible and it has broken me.
É
Philosophy →
In truth, there is no divorce between philosophy and life.
~ Simone de Beauvoir
slip:4a1053.
It’s the simple things →
Every time Iāve had a low-back problem on the road, it was because I jumped right into a bend and twist activity (moving luggage, picking up a kid, once it was dragging a vacuum) without being mindful of the mechanical situation my body had just been through the last few hours. The body needs a transition zoneājust a little time to remind it of all the other positions it might have forgotten it could assume after repeating a single shape or pattern for an extended period of time.
~ Katy Bowman from, Travel Well
slip:4unuta1.
In addition to some wonderful movements you’ll find therein, there’re endless movements you can find on your own. Movement to be found in a chair, or standing by a table, or with a lacrosse ball that you manipulate on the floor with your feetā¦ Movement to be found hanging, or leaning, or endless inspiration in yoga and tai chiā¦ There are so many ways you can move, but it seems to be too rare that people set aside time to experiment. “What if I laid on the floor and triedā¦ ?” or “What if I took my shoes offā¦” “What if I stood on one leg whileā¦” There are just so many things to try.
É
Culture, passion, curiosity →
If culture is sufficient to establish what we eat, how we speak, and ten thousand other societal norms, why isn’t it able to teach us a process to make art? Isn’t it possible for the culture to normalize goal setting and passion and curiosity and the ability to persuade? It can. And you don’t have to wait for it to happen. You can begin now.
~ Seth Godin
slip:4a1052.
The open internet lives on →
But, there are always tradeoffs. Relying on someone elseās platform is often just much easier. It doesnāt involve having to maintain your own site, and itās also often where the audience is. The issue with blogs is that you had to attract ā and then keep ā an audience. Tools like RSS acted as a method for keeping people coming back, butā¦ then Google became the de facto provider of RSS reading tools, and then killed it. To this day, that move is still considered one of the defining moments in the shift from a more distributed, independent web to one that is controlled by a few large companies.
~ Mike Masnick from, The Internet Can Still Be Small And Nice, But Itās On All Of Us To Make That Work
slip:4utete1.
My pull quote is really just a small side trail in the article. But I’m quoting it because it reinforces my point (possibly on purpose by the author, possibly by coincidence). Even a maneuver by the giant Google hasn’t killed blogging. Blogging continues. (Hey thanks for reading my blog!) And the same is true for everything else.
Because it all runs on the internet. The walled gardens referred to as social media? ā¦they actually run atop the internet. The current darling-child that is Mastodon? ā¦it uses a protocol called ActivityPub which was invented to enable federated networking of social activity. And ActivityPub runs atop the good ‘ol webā¦ which of course runs on the internet. The true gift is the open internet.
Also: I’m on Mastodon :) just look for @craig@constantine.name to follow this blog, or you can even look for @craig@moversmindset.com to follow the Movers Mindset project.
É
December 11, 2022 ā #10 →
Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
Get 7 for Sunday in your inbox. āĀ Subscribe here.
This issue isĀ https://7forsunday.com/10