He was tall and lanky, and wore black sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He covered his head with a ball cap. What caught my eye about him was his sudden swing to the top of the pull up bar, which required considerable strength and agility. It wasn’t something you usually saw at Bally’s. I stopped what I was doing and watched. He repeated the fluid, challenging movement four more times. Impressive. He let himself down gently, and took a break on one of the chest press benches.
Not long afterwards I was doing some shoulder presses when I again caught him out of the corner of my eye. This time he was doing pullups but at the top he was pulling his entire body up and over to the side. Again, this took far more strength and agility than a simple pullup, and it was a beautiful thing to watch. I put my weights down and enjoyed watching this quiet young man work. Over and over, he maneuvered his body into aerial positions that demanded great physical discipline and power.
When he finished, I put my dumbbells away and approached him. He had the wide open, friendly face of someone in his late teens or early twenties, and he pulled out his ear buds as I approached. I told him that he was a pure joy to watch, that his athleticism and his grace were fantastic. I added that nobody at the gym did the things that he did, and for me it was a delight to watch him in motion. His face filled with joy. Then he gave me his gift. He pulled up the fabric on his left leg and there were huge, horrible scars. It looked as though someone had sewn his entire foot back on. Clearly this young man was coming back from a horrendous accident.
He looked at me, face full of appreciation, and said “You don’t know how much that means to me.” And I said that it meant a great deal to me, to see what he was doing with himself, and how brave he was. Whatever this young man has been through, he has met it, faced it, and overcome it, and is showing the rest of us at the gym how to express physicality with power, grace and courage.
This wonderful young man reminded me that we never know what others are going through, what they have endured, and how important it is to acknowledge them whether we know their journey or not. The key thing is to feed others the compliments they deserve. Every so often you will receive a gift in return that will more than return the favor, it will shift your life.
There is no guarantee that others will accept your words. But most often people are hungry for sincere WordFood, and it will strike fertile ground. Even if it doesn’t, your intent is what matters, and that is enough.
WordFood of Tolerance
My best friend Lori sent me a piece by Ben Stein this morning which addressed the need for God and religion in our society, our schools, and in our lives. His comments had been featured on CBS on Sunday morning and been sent around the Internet, and part of his comment was that because the email was about God, it was likely not to be forwarded as much as lewd jokes or cartoons. He has a point.
In my book WordFood I talk about how it’s easy to be consumed by popular culture, by tabloids, gossip, distractions. This is what I call Junk Food. Like potato chips and other snacks, it’s addictive, fun to consume, fattening, and extremely bad for you. Ultimately it takes up precious space in the mind where more positive, nutritious information could be building us: education, professional and personal development, motivational tapes that challenge you to a higher quality of thinking. And yes, religious study, whatever that may look like to you.
Every one of us is animated by something larger, some gift, that gives us life. And I believe powerfully that while we have life, we owe a good life to the power that gave us that life. Most of us were brought up within some kind of belief system. Some of us go find something that speaks to us more personally. Some create a system by which we establish a discipline, and this is the key word here, to live, worship, and respect others’ way of being in the world. But whatever that practice may be, it involves a discipline of mind, and a humbling of oneself to a greater power, and an effort to see that good that exists in all humankind.
To the extent that we are insistent upon filling our minds with Junk Food about celebrities who are less than stellar, about sports figures who take drugs, we miss out on the everyday heroes who people our neighborhood. There is much to study about ourselves that is valuable. To fill our minds with how to be better citizens and life students and better friends.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a little Junk Food now and then. Even I know how Kim Kardashian is, if only because I stand too long in the 15 item line. It just seems to me that given the great variety and beauty of sacred texts in the world, and how they exhort us to treat each other with respect, perhaps this might be balancing fare to the ugliness of “Survivor: The Phillipines.”
What we feed our minds informs our language. It informs how we treat each other every day. Road rage is the result of a daily diet of stress, a lack of graciousness and the need to be right no matter what. And people are dying because someone gets cut off a few inches in traffic.This isn’t us.
Whether we read a Bible, a Koran, a Torah or any other sacred text, it grounds is in what is truly important in life: respect for life, humility for our place in the vastness of all of Creation, and a hope that we can make a difference.
When it comes to the intensely private and personal issue of what we all are guided by, this is an unknowable. But I can say this: that a change in our WordFood Diet is a fine thing when we want to change the way we perceive, and are perceived, in the world.