Summer Vacation.
Greetings and salutations from Sauna, Michigan.
I went to Barnes and Noble today with Heidi to help my mother purchase a gift for a relative. While there, the books beckoned, and I pulled a couple on basketball from the shelf.
I learned a couple things about Michael Jordan that I did not know.
He approaches life with the notion of goals as building blocks and fear as an illusion.
An example to demonstrate was a jump in the pool. If he could not swim, then he'd jump in the pool with the goal of the ability to just stay afloat. The medal-winning butterfly stroke would follow a long way down the road with built goals in a step-by-step and short-term nature.
Goals build on themselves, to Michael. He claims to have never written any of the short-term goals he set, but he would instinctually make those goals to reach. The point of attainable short-term goals are to build upon them, and as one reaches more short-term goals, they do build on themselves quite often without the person knowing that they have progressed far past the starting point.
Apparently, Heidi says that I have come a long way with my back rehabilitation. My chiropractor also has mentioned this. I can barely see it because I could barely walk in March.
The negatives and the steps back reside with greater frequency in the long-term memory. For instance, I've caught myself at multiple times, sometimes multiple times each day, with the notion that I've really shat up my life from the point I moved back to Detroit. From that day, right before Xmas, I traded warm arid climate, which was the perfect weather. I picked up a climate that never knows tolerable for very long. I picked up a job at a retail store which almost caused me to lose the ability to walk. I've suffered through pulled muscles and out-of-place joints, joints that have re-formed and don't feel right because they're used to being out of place, stiffness, aches, stabbing pains as if a knife is plunged in the middle of my spine, no money, no ability to work, no hope of a writing career, no ability to take a shit without wincing in pain, no ability to take a shower unless I take the most gentle moves which translates into an hour, no ability to do anything, be anyone, go anywhere.
Are you kidding me?
That's what I end up saying to myself, even when my mind only chooses to see the worst.
I have a family that loves me, is in close proximity, and supports me through every little triumph and setback. That's about the long and the short of it. It's funny how the mind sums up good things and doesn't highlight them amongst the memory drama.
Even if I didn't have them, I'd still have my thoughts. If I didn't have my thoughts, then I'd hope that someone would do something good with my meat and vegetables.
The summer heat can't be beat. It's natural to return to Michigan for one of the most humid and uncomfortable summers in some time. When the humidity level is at 94 percent, like it was last night, there ain't anything one can do in a house without central air but run the fans and enjoy the sweat.
I bought a fan with an ion charger that purifies the air. I plan sitting right in front of it and using it as my hyperbaric chamber to quicker recovery.
My life isn't all a bunch of cries. There are some smiles, and one of them was the movie I went to see with Heidi last night.
I never read much Dahl, but the newest Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was perfect. Depp played a wonderful eccentric billionaire. The kids were precious. Tim Burton was on top of his creative game. The reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey made itself well-loved in my heart.
Here's to better days, one step at a time.