I sometimes read in inspirational and self-help books that if a person hasn’t had a number of failures, he isn’t trying enough. You know that story: set the bar sufficiently high to be a challenge and you will fail sometimes.
I am not sure I buy the notion completely but I am convinced that experiments can pay off and that experiments must be expected to fail sometimes. Thomas Edison is supposed to have failed in many experiments to achieve the desired result and to have said that he hadn’t failed but had discovered hundreds of things that didn’t work.
Much of a typical morning these days is spent watching parts of Facebook videos that Lynn shares with me. She only picks the best stuff. She showed me an ice fisherman grabbed and taken by a killer whale this morning. (I have been wondering about its authenticity and why a camera was at the ready.) A friend told me a decade ago not to send him links to videos because he already spent too much of his time watching YouTube videos.
The other day, she showed me a performance by the Japanese dancer Kenichi Ebina. (Uh, oh: another video coming up). Watching his amazing performance, I was most impressed by his pop-up moves where he goes from lying flat out on his belly to standing in a flash, seemingly from the feet and ankles first. Wrestlers, law enforcement and street fighters would love to be able to simply pop back up from a flat position like that. At an earlier point, he seens to drop his head off his shoulders and into his waiting hands down at waist level.
Watching what this 39 year old man can do, I was reminded of my yoga classes. I have read in several books that experts consider flexibility to be a major part of physical fitness. My ankles were giving me some trouble and a doctor told me to stand on a slant board daily. He commented that wrestlers, dancers and yoga practitioners sometimes keep their ability to bring their toes toward their shins but that most people let the ankle and foot tendons shorten too much. That comment was the third I had heard about the benefits of yoga and I started attending classes.
In the classes, it was very impressive to see women sit with their legs fully extended on the floor and drop over so that their entire upper body was also on the floor, between their legs. I could never even get to a 45° angle. There are many other stretches and postures that many women and some men can take that I can’t and never will be able to. I have learned that one wants the joints to be able to hold a position and that there can be too much flexibility but that has never been my problem. I consider that failure to a natural one and I don’t seem to suffer too much from my degree of stiffness.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
