The Rounded Earth
This morning I have good news and bad news. The news of Reverend Warnock’s Georgia Senate win was last night’s news. I applaud Hirschel Walker at long last for conceding defeat in what must have been a great moment of relief to him. He clearly got cajoled into the race and I’m sure for some time now he has been wondering what in hell he was thinking. Many of us have some dirty linen we would rather not display on the clothesline of public opinion, but Hirschel has a bundle as thick as his muscular neck. My news involves my neck. It also involves my arms and my chest and my lower back and my inner thighs and hamstrings. I went to the “Perfect Workout” with Kim for my second and first full visit yesterday. This is only a twenty minute ordeal, and Kim likes to say you can put up with anything for twenty minutes, but its the two days following that twenty minutes that got me last week and that I’m feeling this morning. So, the bad news is that I woke up early today because my legs and back were so sore that I just had to get out of bed at 5:30am. The good news is that I don’t feel as debilitated this morning as I did last week at this time, which means that I must be getting used to it somewhat even though this week was more complete in its torture of my body.
The “Perfect Workout” is supposed to be perfect because it takes very little time (that’s a good start) and it is what they call HIT or high intensity training. The theory is that if you do strength training with very high weight levels and do it VERY slowly in each direction and thereby maximize the time that your muscles are under duress, you will build much better endurance and strength. There have been many physiological training theories over the years, so why should this one be any better than the rest? I am not physiologist enough to know the answer to that, but I do know that my physiological guru is my massage therapist Andrew, who manages to expose each and every soreness in my body and exorcise it each week over a two-hour deep tissue massage. I have never had anyone know my body as well as Andrew does and while that may be a dubious benefit to him, it is wonderful for me. In many ways, Andrew is what keeps me going on my hillside each week no matter what sort of stupid gymnastics I get myself into. Andrew tells me he almost went to work for the “Perfect Workout” people a few years ago because he thinks it is the right training methodology for maximum muscular and joint benefit and that it is especially valuable for people of my age. I did not peel that age onion any further because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it is about aging joints and muscles that make them benefit from such duress, but I do take his words as gospel when it comes to my body.
So, this morning I am once again watching the sun rise and the morning light come up onto my hilltop and this is what brings me to my realization about the shape of the earth. I am going to guess that I have known that the earth is round for about 65 years. I always say that human reasoning starts at about age three, and I maintain that even living in Caracas, so very near the Equator, I still was brought to an understanding of the shape of the world and that this was not one big flat piece of dirt that extended to some edge where everything ended. As I grew up and as my thinking process got refined, I learned that Columbus was the headliner who took the plunge and sailed West to prove that there was something over that horizon worth searching for. I learned that Ferdinand Magellan, only some 500 years ago took it upon himself to give us more convincing proof that if you sailed in one direction, you would eventually find your way back home. I understand that as I have broadened my understanding of history that neither Columbus or Magellan were really the great geospatial theorists that Eratosthenes or Pythagoras of Ancient Greece were, but they did put their keisters where there mouths were and doers are always remembered more than thinkers in this world, so good on them.
I find that once I’ve been a doer, like say by going to the “Perfect Workout” yesterday, I am prone to spending a bit more time being a thinker in order to allow my muscles and joints to recover. That is a questionable tactic to be sure since I always feel the worst just as I get up from a bout of sitting and thinking, just as I will when I get up in a bit from this desk and prepare for my morning walk with Kim and Betty. But I will muscle through it nonetheless and use my thinking time to do things like contemplate the universe.
What has caught my fancy this morning is the sunrise to the East. From my desk chair, which I have thoroughly described on several occasions, I can see three ordinal directions (all but South). At this time of day, the easterly view is of what I call our cactus knoll. This house was so perfectly positioned when built that it not only sits on the very top of this hilltop of some forty houses, but it has used the natural landscape and bouldered chaparral terrain to meaningfully block it from the houses on each side, which are not so very close, but still better left unseen. On this end of the house, my office is set perhaps six or eight feet below the apex of the hill (actually a small knoll of the hill), which, if denuded of vegetation, might give me a glimpse of the neighbor’s rooftop, but with normal cactus and spiny succulents that have been planted and have grown to their natural heights of an added six to eight feet, have completely blocked me from seeing any trace of habitation nearby. That is good planning that has a real naturalist bent. The types of cacti and succulents that inhabit this subtropical chaparral are the stuff of Dr. Seuss, who lived around here when he wrote the likes of The Cat in the Hat and such other fanciful illustrated stories That makes my ground-level view of my knoll quite fanciful, which is a great inspirational push to many of my mornings. The layering of greens with Aloes, Aeoniums, Dragon Trees, pipe-organ cacti, golden barrel cacti, saguaro cacti, jade plants and Madagascar palms is really quite amazing.
But beyond the cactus knoll is the subject of my thoughts this morning. Due to the positioning, beyond the knoll is the void. All I can see is sky. In fact, given the shape of the knoll, that void appears like a horizon, except on a truncated basis. And beyond that horizon this morning is a large, fluffy, cumulus cloud that looks like an iceberg. That means that what I can see is likely matched or more with cloud that is hidden below the horizon, in this case the artificial and nearby horizon created by my landscape. It is an energizing sight with the cloud highlighted from behind by the rising sun of morning.
Tomorrow we will be flying over that horizon at about this time of day as we take off on JetBlue for New York. I once told my oldest son that living in San Diego was not so different from us moving to Florida (Yeesh!) in that it was simply five hours flight versus three hours flight. But that belies the time zone reality of the rounded earth we live on. We were last in NYC about five weeks ago and I will be back in NYC in about another five weeks, so it really is not so far as to impede us being there for one another as is needed or desired. Now that COVID has, more or less, passed, the rounded earth is not a barrier to us, but it will always be a source of wonder for me as I constantly ponder what is just beyond my sight and just over the horizon.