Lift or Lose
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Now is not the time to ease your grip on the iron or allow your appetite to stray. Disciplines that trickle today were all wet yesterday and will vanish like mist tomorrow. Your determination, your commitment and your aspiration, should you bow to comfort and craving, are illusions; your passion and toughness, shams.
Sheesh, what a crap head, or, as Steve Reeves said at the Citadel, “By the Gods, Octavius, what a poop brain.” You’d better get your act together, gladiators, or you’ll be out of shape and miserable before you can say Happy Thanksgiving, pass me the yams.
Now is the time for us to roar. More rather, that the world might hear us loud and clear, to ROAR: initiate Responsibility, seek Order, embrace Aspiration and affect Resolve.
So I get an F for creativity, but the message is not that original either.
Imagine if there was personal responsibility in the world, what a wonderful place it would be: reliability, respect and consideration for one another, picking up after one’s self, accountability for one’s actions, independence yet healthy inter-dependency.
Responsibility is a superlative quality and its rewards are widespread and long-lasting. It should be a natural attribute to mankind, particularly bombers and ironheads, yet it requires awareness, care, hard work, courage, humility, generosity and discipline. A responsible person is exceptional, the unshakable foundation of mankind.
Where responsibility persists there is an absence of cheating and lying, apathy and laziness, blaming and excusing, greed and gluttony, snorting and smoking and missing a workout cuz you don’t wanna.
Irresponsibility sucks.
I love order in my life. I think it has something to do with portioning my life into exercises, sets and reps and muscle groups since I was 10. I count everything always, people crossing intersections, ruts in the road, the rise and fall in cadence of emergency vehicle sirens in the neighborhood and keys on the keyboard, especially when the computer screen is blank for more than 8 to10 hours.
I’m loopy. My doctor suggests medication. He’s overweight. I suggest exercises, sets and reps.
Order promotes inner calm (a panacea, the missing link, a long-endangered species, the fuzzy little rabbit in the magician’s top hat), availing us to the opportunity to plan and see clearly the days ahead. Order provides room to deal with life, a rather large intruder upon our imagining of the things. Within order I may reason and control, whereas disorder presents dysfunction and desperation. Disorder is disabling and smells foul.
Disorder stinks.
You go nowhere in particular without aspiration. This precious gem has to do with purpose and need, desire and ambition. I became acquainted with aspiration and its unpolished associates while plodding along life’s early years. Loaded with those nuggets, like a plow-yoked oxen before a field of stumps, I trudged onward. By accident and will, the field was made right, leveled, refined, cleared… though clogs and small stones remain forever unturned.
Goals are scribbled on paper. Aspirations are inscribed on the heart.
Aspiration reigns.
Resolve is like Flexi-glue, an invention of mine that never reached the market due to lack of resolve. It is strong, durable and resilient and bends with the surface of daily living. It never lets go. Resolve is not cheap, it doesn’t grow on trees and you can’t buy it with money. Indeed, he or she who possesses this fine quality is very well off. You must have it to succeed.
Resolve is known by various names to an assortment of people. Stick-to-it-iveness, a common reference, is inborn, like bone structure and commonsense, yet it can be developed like muscle and might. That is, of course, if it is preceded by responsibility, order and aspiration. Doggedness, as the name implies, is a sort of self-imposed leash that sets one free to go in the right direction without stopping, except for begging, sniffing, peeing and tail-wagging.
Then there’s determination, the most enjoyed denotation, which cannot be substituted, replaced, invented or improvised. Without determination, resolve-squared, the adventurer does not go far or fast. He languishes.
The mild-mannered will be relieved knowing that to ROAR does not require a lot of noise. I’m all for an authentic grunt on occasion and a few appropriate huffs and puffs, but true roaring is an internal feature of the responsible, orderly, aspiring and resolved person of character.
Resolve rules.
With heavy iron and the ROAR of might, we forge ahead. They, the others, think we lift weights to build our stunning muscles and formidable power for us and our faltering egos alone. But they are wrong again. We strain in pain in dungeons and garages and basement corners, persistently and without regret, because our collective ROAR contributes directly to the good -- the excellence -- of mankind, from Secaucus to San Francisco, Pyongyang to Tehran.
We are warriors, noble, selfless and unafraid.
That’s a little over the top, but our general self-esteem and level of confidence are in the dumpster and, like old river barges ferrying scrap metal on the Hackensack, we need constant bolstering and shoring up.
Well, looky here. It’s the end.
Go directly to the gym and twist some metal. I insist.
Go… Godspeed… Dave
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