Literal, symbolic resurrection

Christ in glory

The resurrection of Christ, as imagined in the Japanese animated movie “The Golden Laws”, a story not so much about Jesus as about time traveling teens. Still, I enjoy watching that scene. ^_^ 

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is and should be the part that sends people running, either away from or toward the religion. It is the central mystery (or madness) of the faith, the impossibility above all others. Various attempts have been made to make it more palatable, not only in the modern age but already a couple centuries after the event:  It was to be understood spiritually, or figuratively, not literally, said some. The Church eventually decided to leave it unexplained, for the most part, and that is probably for the best. It seems fair to me if the world thinks Christians stupid if not outright crazy, and worthy of pity: After all, this is how Christians feel about the world as well.

But one interesting detail about the role of the Resurrection has occurred to me only later in my life: The apostle Paul, who is the one who most frequently talks about Christ’s death and resurrection in us, in our lives, as the death of the old life and the breakthrough of a new and heavenly life – this apostle is also the one who most strongly insists that the Resurrection was thoroughly real. If Jesus was not resurrected, then our faith is nothing, says this same man. He refers to several contemporaries who saw Jesus after the Resurrection, as well as an unspecified group of over 500, most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing. This is not a historian, rather Paul wrote about things that happened in public in his own time. And yet, he is the one who keeps going on about “Christ in us” and the inner meaning of His death and resurrection.

You’d think those two viewpoints would appear from two different sources, right? One taking the Resurrection literally, another symbolically. But on the contrary, it is the same person who is most focused on one who also goes on about the other.

Now it may be argued that Paul joined the new religion well after Jesus had left for Heaven, and there is no hint that he ever met the risen Lord except in visions. On the other hand, the Resurrection is clearly the big selling point of the young church in the mouth of Peter as well, who was in the thick of it. You have to be very creative to find any hints that the first Christians did not believe in the literal resurrection of Christ. And yet, most of them don’t mention it as a spiritual process in the life of Christians. It may have been enough for them to know that their martyrdom would be temporary: Jesus would come back and raise them from the dead, so death was not a permanent setback. Any symbolic meaning of the event seems to have been little discussed, if at all. Except for Paul, although John also makes some mention of Christ in us.

Now I am not a preacher, or at least I try not to be. I just wanted to point out the strange connection, that the literal and the symbolic belief seemed to go hand in hand, rather than being opposites as they are seen today.

Life: Short, narrow & shallow

Beach with ocean

Newtonian worldview?

It is well known that life is short. In all fairness, it was generally shorter before. Life expectancy in the rich world is still increasing by about five hours a day. But even if I lived till I was a thousand years old – which is as unlikely as sprouting wings – I would still feel that my life was short, and wish for it to last longer.

There are those who struggle with suffering – usually of the mind – so severe that they prefer life to end. But I am unfamiliar with this feeling. And even that is not all.

Life is not only short, but also narrow. I have written about this before, saying that there are so many things that are mutually exclusive. You cannot be married and single, atheist and worshiper, or even hold different religions at the same time. (Well, at least it is hard to do, although Huston Smith came pretty close.) And so on. But even of the non-exclusive things we could do, there is not really time to do more than a sample.  This is what I say now: Even if I had a thousand bodies, none of them would get bored. There are just so many things to do, so many things to learn, so many thoughts to think, so many words that should be spoken before they are lost forever. There is just so much of everything, that even a thousand bodies for a thousand years would not find time for boredom. That is how I feel.

But there is yet another dimension! Even beyond the length of time, and even with only this one body, this one life, there is so little of that life that “sticks”, so little that is actually taken in, and so little that is actually done. I call this the shallowness of my life. Well, I can’t blame anyone else for that. But I have this thought experiment that I run in various forms. To make it simple this time, let us imagine I had some magic or technology that let me send my mind, with all its memories, one year back in time.

You may have seen the movie “Groundhog Day”. If not, you should at least read up on it. It is pretty good. As a friend of mine said, she could watch it over and over. ^_^ That is basically what it is about, a man living the same day over and over until he learned his lesson. Well, that was what I got out of it. Anyway, my thought experiment is a kind of “groundhog year”. How many times would I want to live the last year over?

A year is long enough to make some different choices, but not to live a completely different life. I would not be able to get a new job, probably, or at least not anything radically different. I would not be able to move very far. I sincerely doubt I could marry even had I wanted to, much less have children. So basically a minor variation of the same life I have lived this past year. Would I do that once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times?

It is hard to say, but my best guess is a few thousand. I mean, if I could take my memories with me. There are so many books I would want to read, so many stories I would like to write and rewrite to see whether they were worth it, so many people I could get to know, so many languages to learn, so many problems to get better at solving in my job… there is so much even in an ordinary year of an ordinary life, that I feel like dart hurtling through time, barely seeing and doing anything.

I don’t think I could do it millions of times though. Not that I would not enjoy it, but at some point I think my mind would run full, so I would forget as much as I learned. Eventually I would read what I thought was a new book, while I actually read it 5000 rounds ago and just forgot it in the meantime… Perhaps. Or perhaps my mind would evolve and expand, to see things from an ever higher perspective, in ever greater depth and richness. There has been a vague, halting tendency in that direction, I think.

(But realistically, I would probably spend some of those years playing Sims 3. -_- Even now that I don’t have unlimited time, I still play either Sims 3 or City of Heroes at least a bit, most days of the week. And even more on the weekend, such as now.)

Anyway, those are the three dimensions of how much larger life is than me. There may be more. Perhaps if I live long enough, I will return with a fourth or even fifth. Actually I can kind of vaguely see at least one more even now, see my mention above about the possibility of seeing things from a radically higher perspective.

How I feel about life is that I am like a bottle with a few drops at the bottom. That is all I have managed to get out of my life so far. Even though it seems to me that my time passes slower than for most, I still feel like it runs through my fingers. Isaac Newton said: “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That is the same feeling, I think. Except his ocean was wider and deeper, because he was.

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There’s more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There’s far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found…
-Tim Rice, Circle of Life.

Magic tech levels

In the world of Daggerfall, a kindly mage or priest may heal you in a minute, unlike my state-appointed doctor who usually just tells me to exercise more. ^_^

Yesterday I wrote about how the chance of women doing dangerous work depended largely on the medical tech level of society:  If plagues keep killing people off, someone has to supply more babies. Each human has a slightly different immune system, so rolling the dice over and over makes perfect sense in that perspective. This is how it has been in the real world, but any fantasy world using mortals will have to contend with the same issues.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but I would also argue that any sufficiently researched magic is indistinguishable from technology. For instance in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, the One Power is reliable and thoroughly researched, making magic a very predictable thing. Healing is available but limited by the number of channelers in the world.

In Stephen Donaldson’s first Covenant trilogy, the Land is rich in magic. It is not well understood, but simple healing magic is widespread. The citizens there seem to be no worse off than modern man when it comes to surviving ordinary afflictions. There are of course other dangers in Covenant’s dreams, but ill health is not the worst of them.

In contrast, the Middle Earth of Tolkien – while fantastic in some ways – does not have widespread magic use. Magic is spectacular, miraculous, and rare. The elves seem to have healing power and are pretty much immune to non-violent death, but they live by themselves for the most part. Ordinary people and hobbits cannot expect to have their wounds cured quickly and cheaply in their local village.

The inhabitants of the role playing game Daggerfall, on the other hand, are in luck: Pretty much any town or large village has a temple where diseases and wounds can be healed either for free or at a reasonable price. There are also potions to be bought. The Mages Guild also has a school of Restoration, as well as selling various healing items.  With regard to diseases and accidents, Daggerfall would be a better place to live than the modern world. (Of course, the rampant violence makes up for this.)

If you create your own fantasy world, it would be wise to give some thought in advance to the “magical tech level” of the world, or the parts of the world where your story takes place. Is magic widespread, reliable and well understood? In that case, life may be similar to modern life in many ways:  Affordable health care, fast transportation, long-distance communication and so on. The principles would be different, but humans have largely the same basic needs and desires everywhere, so magic would be used to accommodate them much like technology is here.

A classic example of this is the “Darkness” series by Harry Turtledove, set on the continent of Derlavai. This world has undergone a thaumaturgical revolution similar to our industrial revolution, and magic is used in much the same way as technology is here. In fact, the series is an elaborate paraphrase of the second world war, but different in details so as to remain unpredictable.

It can be quite interesting to look at books and role playing games in this way, seeing whether their “magical technology” is in line with the culture described. And of course, it will be useful if we try to write our own fantasy stories, as some of us like to do.

 

Tech levels and gender roles

Women warriors in plate male, from the game Skyrim. I’ve seen less realistic things. But also more.

In the current era, gender roles are a lot more loose than they used to be. The career choices, for instance, are actually choices. Female soldiers may have a tough time getting along with their male comrades (this varies a bit from country to country) but there are still a bunch of them. More and more doctors are women, although the number of male nurses have not risen to the same degree. And while most carpenters are still men, this is now largely a personal choice: You won’t become an outcast if you take an unusual job, at least if you are a woman.

When kids these days play sword and sorcery type role playing games, they are as likely to run into a female warrior or thief as a male, even though the setting of the game is “medieval”, and in the actual Middle Ages this was extremely rare. Is it simply a projection of our modern ways of thinking into the past? Why didn’t women become soldiers and adventurers in the Middle Ages?

If you think it was because of the particular religion in the Middle Ages, you are way off. The religion may have made up a cultural framework for the era, but all religions had to adapt to the real world to some degree. And in the real world, women needed to have children, lots and lots of children, to even keep the population steady.

The era of rapid population growth started only a couple centuries ago. Part of this was progress in agriculture, of course. But if starvation was what limited population size, it would have made perfect sense to have female soldiers. That way, in the unfortunate case that they fell in battle, there would be no children of them henceforth and fewer mouths to feed.

But in the real Middle Ages, and before and later as well, there were other factors that checked the population growth. One was war itself, of course. From time to time, a king would decide to invade a neighboring country which he thought he had some claim to, and armies rode off (or marched off, in the case of peasants) to do battle. While there were no weapons of mass destruction at the time, battles were quite savage. Many died on the battlefield, and others died afterwards from the wounds. (Even minor wounds were often fatal because of infections.) Thus, in order to have enough warriors at all times, it was necessary for the women to stay at home and give birth to more boys. A woman would generally be much less useful than a man on the battlefield, due to the difference in size and muscle, but if she stayed at home she could give birth to several boys who would grow up to strong warriors in the wars of the next generation.

Basically, if there were any societies that sent their women to do battle, these societies were conquered and replaced by those who did not.

In addition to death by sword, there was also death by plague. From the High Middle Ages onward, bubonic plague was a recurring scythe over Europe. Other horrors like typhoid fever and diphtheria ravaged the land later, and not least smallpox. “A pox on your house” was a curse that was quite likely to come true. While starvation made all these worse, even the well fed could not stand up to the Great Plagues. It was not uncommon in a village for farms to be empty as everyone in the house had died, or only a child or two remained to be taken in by relatives elsewhere. So if you had more than your fair share of kids, there was a decent chance that they could take over someone else’s farm, or smithy, or fishing boat. Usually a relative, of course, but for a while after the Black Death there was land enough for pretty much anyone who could work it.

With germ theory and improved hygiene, death by plague began to dwindle. While it is still a threat, we don’t think much about it right now. Maybe a new super-plague will wipe out most of the human population, in which case I suspect gender roles will begin to revert to their earlier form. I am not eager to see that hypothesis tested in practice, though.

***

 If you are planning to write a fantasy novel, or for that matter a science fiction novel, you should keep the above in mind. Basically the question is: Your population, is it limited by free will? By starvation? By plague? By war? Alien abductions? Infertility viruses? Any combination of the above?

The first of these – contraception and starvation – encourage sexual equality, as this brings population growth down. Any other limiting factors will encourage women to stay home and give birth to babies and raise them.

If food supply is the limiting factor but only temporarily, there may be other ways for society to bring down birth rates, such as women becoming nuns in large numbers. A more drastic solution is to kill female babies, to ensure that most children who grow up are warriors who can expand our lands.

So you see, if you want to have lots of chicks in chain mail, you need to do your worldbuilding right. Or you could target a stupid audience, I suppose.

 

 

Fructose revisited

Don't mess around, we're baking here!

Don’t mess around, we’re baking here! But what kind of sugar are we using?

I have spoken out against fructose in the past, so maybe it pleases the Light that I am now looking to eat more of it. In this particular case, I cannot recommend you follow my example. But I do have a reason for what I do. It is not just because the voices in my head tell me. ^_^

I am first going to sum up some useful facts about fructose. Then I will explain why it may be useful for me and a few others like me. Finally I will argue why most people should stay away from it.

***

Fructose is a sugar that appears naturally in honey, and in fruits (thus the name) together with glucose. (The proportion varies among different types of fruit.) It is easy to create from corn (maize) and therefore very cheap in the US, where it is widely used as a sweetener.

Where fructose appears in the intestines, it is absorbed into the blood and goes to the liver, where it is given a special treatment that no other sugars get. Unlike all other sugars, fructose can be converted to fat with very little loss of energy. More exactly, the liver converts it to triglycerids which are released into the bloodstream. Hopefully fat cells will pack these away, otherwise they may settle on the inside of your arteries and bad things are likely to happen.

Approximately 20% of the fructose is converted to glucose instead and ends up as blood sugar. This is much less than ordinary cane sugar, which ends up as 80% blood sugar. If you are a diabetic or pre-diabetic, this is definitely something to consider! (I am diagnosed with pre-diabetes, so this is relevant to me.) Fructose is also almost 50% sweeter than common sugar, so for the same sweetness you get about 6 times more blood sugar with cane sugar than fructose!

High-fructose corn syrup, which is the usual sweetener in soda etc in the USA, contains both glucose and fructose. Glucose becomes blood sugar directly, so you still get a spike in blood sugar when you drink it, and then a little later you get the fat from the fructose.

***

Most people with diabetes II (late-onset diabetes) or pre-diabetes are fat, to put it bluntly. Usually you can see this at a glance, but there are also some who have the fat stored mostly around their guts and kidneys where it is not so easy to spot. It is mostly this fat that contributes to diabetes. Fat on the hips and thighs is pretty much harmless, while the fat that is scattered around on your body under your skin is somewhat dangerous but not as bad as the gut fat.

In my case, however, things are a little different. I have another illness that means I can only eat small quantities of fat. After I stopped eating normal fat-rich food in spring 2005, I lost weight for several months. At the end I had lost almost 15% of my weight, and I was only moderately overweight before. The thinner I became, the hungrier I became too. This cannot be helped, after all, the body will try to preserve itself.

Since I could no longer eat fat, I ended up eating twice as much carbs instead.  (Carbohydrates contain half as much energy as fat, and in addition much of the energy is lost when the body tries to convert it to fat. Except for fructose, as I mentioned before, which is converted almost perfectly into fat.)

The constant intake of carbs means my body is always awash in sugar. (More complex carbs are broken down into sugar before they are absorbed into the blood.) So my high blood sugar is not because my fat storage is full and cannot store away the sugar: There is plenty of room for more fat, I am well below my natural weight. Rather, the blood sugar comes from constant intake of carbs, which I have to do:  If I stopped eating carbs as well as fat, I would starve.

However, since my problem is not too much fat, I could eat fructose. The liver would convert it into fat and only 20% would become blood sugar. This would solve the pre-diabetes problem. Furthermore, because of my exercise asthma I can not exercise at high intensity, where you burn mostly carbs. My exercise is mostly in the fat-burning range.  So once again, fructose to the rescue. As long as I exercise regularly, the fat from the fructose would be burned away before it had time to settle on my arteries. Probably.

*** 

 Most of you, however, eat fat. You may not actively seek it out, but you eat ordinary food: Cakes, bread with butter or margarine, mayonnaise, steaks, sauces, fast food, chips and milk chocolate among others. Even cookies contain quite a bit of fat. When you become sensitive to fat, you discover how much fat there is in food that does not even taste fatty. Anyway, you eat fat already.

I am not a fan of the Atkins diet, but one thing it got right (for most people) is that if you eat fat, your appetite for more fat will fall. You will still happily eat something sweet, though. I am sure most of you are aware of the “dessert stomach” phenomenon: You could not eat one more bite of sausage, but you will happily eat a plate full of sugary dessert. The thing is, if you use fructose for this, your body will get far more fat than it thought. Not a good idea. You already have plenty of fat without tricking your body into eating more of it!

Of course, if you have a treadmill at your office desk as some people here in Norway have recently, you can get away with it. But if you live a sedentary life and eat fat, stay off the fructose. Leave it to us who can’t get fat the normal way, OK?

 

The other fools’ days

Do people on your planet save each other because they want something?

“What, do people save each other on your planet just because they want something?” You could certainly get that impression sometimes. Don’t be fooled though!

I won’t write much, since this is April Fools’ day. People are naturally skeptical of whatever is written on this day. I certainly understand that.

What I’d like was if people would be skeptical of the foolishness of the other 365 days of the year. (Since it is a leap year, I mean. The other 364 next year.)

There are people trying to fool you every day. Fool you into buying something that you don’t need and which won’t make you happy. Fool you into supporting policies that will cause more misery than happiness. Fool you into believing in wrong myths that only close your mind instead of opening it to the true brightness.

For the most part, those who wish to fool you have something in common: They want something from you. Or if not, they are fooled by those who do, and are running their errands. Trace the chain of command back and see whether you find someone who wish to give or someone who wish to take. This is your best bet, I believe.This is what I was taught when I was young, and it has served me well so far.

I hope you will find that I, and the One that I revere, want to see you happy for your own sake. We do not want or need to take anything from you. But if you don’t believe me – and it is understandable if you don’t – then look at those who tower far above me. Buddha, who left a castle and a kingdom to seek Enlightenment. Moses, who chose to suffer with God’s people rather than be called Pharaoh’s daughter’s son. Jesus, who turned his back on the kingdoms of this world and all their glory, and testified that his Kingdom was not of this world. And many, many great lights throughout history, who gave without asking anything in return. This is your best bet to find someone who is not out to fool you. Let us rather become fools for your sake, than you for ours.

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
-Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah.

The little we can

“Is it okay if I’m not perfect?” Yes, it is OK, it is only natural. It is to be expected. Very few of us can do much, but if we do the small things at the right time, we will be okay.

I wonder if people – those who notice me at all – think of me as something like the “1%” which people like to hate and envy in America because they are super rich. Not that I am rich by first world standards, but I mean, the envy is probably because people think “those guys have an easy life, while I have it tough.” And I can see why one would think the same about me.

I don’t think there are any, certainly not many, who really have it easy. Well, arguably those who are Enlightened, but usually there is a long and stony road to there. Anyway, not about Enlightenment this time. This is for the rest of us (?) who can’t do miracles even in our own lives.

You may think everything would be easier if you had more money, and I suppose if you are dirt poor that is true. But the happiness that can be bought with money fades very quickly, and you need something more grand to replace it. The joy you got from your first bike is something you can’t get again by buying a new bike once you’ve gotten your first car. Or your first Rolls Royce. You see what I mean? You have to top yourself the whole way, if you seek joy through purchases. This is why rich people say stupid things like “it is not easy for us either, the yacht took almost my whole Christmas bonus.” You probably say just as stupid things if someone in Congo could hear you.

Perhaps you resent me for being in the 1% who can eat all day and not get fat. (Actually I can’t eat all day. If I eat dinner when I come home from work, I stay full until bedtime. But you know what I mean. I never need to be hungry to stay seemingly slim.) Actually, it was not always like that. I was 20 pounds heavier for much of my adult life, until I had an illness in 2005 and became unable to digest fatty foods. You may envy me that if you want, and I will heartily welcome you to share my blessing if possible. But remember, if you eat cakes or steak or a plate of French fries, you’re gonna be so sick that you are ready to write your last will and testament. All things have their price. I did not really have the strength of will to lose weight before, although I have it now that I don’t need it…

Or you may resent me for being able to take long walks in the beautiful Norwegian nature. I guess that is something to be thankful for. But the truth is that when I come home from work, sitting down a few minutes seems like a great idea. And once you sit down, getting up is pretty hard. Norway may have a wonderful nature, but mine is so-so.

Getting up from the couch in front of the TV is probably hard. I don’t have that problem since I don’t have a TV, but getting up from a game of Sims 3 or City of Heroes is not all that easy either. This is not special for you or me. A well-known female trainer here in Norway wrote a while ago: “It is not like I don’t want to sit on the couch and eat chocolate too. But then I press PLAY and the music begins to move my body.” That was her trick to get moving: She had a source of music at hand, loaded with rhythms that filled her with energy. Once she was up and moving, she was OK. Most of us are. It is the mile from sitting to standing that is the hardest. The next mile is easy.

Another essay I read recently was by someone who had studied the nature of habits, and learned something important: Don’t set high goals. Or rather, you can have high aspirations, but your immediate goals must be so easy that you would feel stupid not reaching them. His example: Promise yourself that you will put on your running shoes when you come home from work. Don’t make a resolution to run every day, or at all. Just this: Put on the shoes. Once you have your shoes on, you can decide whether you want to take them off, or want to take a walk in them, or go running for a few minutes or for a long time. There may be all sorts of good reasons for one or the other. Just start with putting the shoes on. Unless you are ready for the ambulance, you can do that much.

And this is my sermon to you, dear congregation. ^_^ Let us put our shoes on. We can do that much. Let us put the music player handily by the couch, let us hide the snacks in the cupboard somewhere far from the TV or computer monitor. Small things like that. Things we can do, even though we are so much weaker than we wanted to be. Or you can do what I do, write a journal entry and let God or Fate read it, like when I joked that my New Year’s resolution was to lose weight without eating less or exercising more. Karma is a bit of a bitch though. I would recommend doing the little we can instead.

Why walking is like anime

Never gonna give up

Screenshot from the anime Eyeshield 21, a recent sports anime. Like most of them, it’s about never giving up.

OK, let me explain the weird title. You know that there are young people who shut themselves in their rooms and watch anime (Japanese cartoons) and read manga (Japanese comic books) all day. Well, more or less. I think that is quite understandable. Japanese serial art is quite advanced and there is a broader range of it than we are used to in the west. In Japane, it is perfectly normal even for housewives and old folks to read comics, as there are series for all kinds of people and all kinds of interest.

For natural reasons, sports series are mostly enjoyed by the young. It typically has young protagonists, often in high school. There is some chaste romance, lots of comradeship, rivalry, and people finding noble motivations for doing their best. And of course there is the whole part about getting better and better. Just when you think you have reached the limit, some new challenge makes it necessary to become even better. Well, life is often like that when you are young. And later too, although it tends to involve work more often than sports for most of us.

Now, there may be thousands of animated TV series, but I doubt any of them has ever been about walking. There are limits to how boring things you can make interesting. But the same principles apply.

***

Last spring I decided to increase my walking from an hour on Saturday to an hour every other day, more or less. The thing that got me started was a couple scientific articles documenting that exercise at the level of fast walking could prevent and actually reverse cancer, as well as various other illnesses. So I began taking these walks regularly. I soon made it a habit to walk for an hour each day unless it was raining.

After only a few weeks, I noticed that I had to walk longer than before to fill that hour – meaning I walked faster – and yet I burned fewer calories (according to my pulse watch). I joked that if this continued, I would eventually be able to move from one place to another just by thinking about it. Of course that is not how it works: Practice does not actually make perfect, but it still makes you pretty good. I had to run a few steps now and then to keep the pulse at the same level as it had been while just walking.

In the summer, I met my first major challenge: Pain in my right foot. It grew rapidly worse, and for a while it was all I could do to get to my job and back. But after I moved, my foot healed rapidly and I began walking even longer, including over fairly large hills. I lost weight and my pulse got even lower than it already was.

In fall, I ran into a more serious challenge. My heartbeat began to grow irregular some days, and one afternoon while I was out walking, my pulse increased to its maximum and stayed there for a while, even when I was resting. Luckily I was near a school and someone called an ambulance. So this was exactly the kind of dramatic turn that you would expect from an anime. What will our hero do now?

Well, I went back to walking after some days, but without pressing myself as much as before. With the coming of winter, roads became slippery and I only walked when necessary. As soon as the ice left the roads, I started walking again.

Recently, the heart palpitations have come back, and I have had two episodes of tachycardia (racing heart). I am on the waiting list to talk with a doctor and have some measurements of my heart while I am walking, hopefully. In the meantime, I am walking, but mostly for half an hour instead of an hour.

Of course I am hoping that the story will progress the way any good anime should: Somehow we will get around the obstacle and I will continue to walk faster and faster, until I can run like the wind. OK, not really realistic with my exercise asthma, I guess. But I can sustain a combination of jogging and walking (mostly walking with brief jogs) already, so if I don’t have to worry about the heart, I should be able to train myself eventually to jog without triggering the asthma. That would be a lot of fun.

Of course, another recurring theme in sports anime is where the hero dies and the real main character swears to take up his mantle and win to honor his memory and show that he made a difference in the world. I would rather prefer this story to not have that ending, as you can imagine! But in the unlikely case that you read this after my passing – well, there is always that. The world needs its heroes – even the world of walking. For now, I shall be quite happy to play my part though!