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Time: 35 minutes
Distance: 3.27 miles
Top Speed: 6.5 mph
Calories: 341
I forgot how much I enjoyed running! :D Serioiusly, there's nothing better than hopping on the treadmill and listening to some JEW. The stress that's been built up over the week has just melted away. Now I'm up for some pizza, some wine, and some Battlestar Galactica.
My schedule has shifted back to the late hours of the day, which I'm still getting used to. It's actually really nice to get up at nearly seven in the morning, check up on e-mail and LJ, meditate, fix breakfast and lunch and ride in with Ryan. Despite the crunch of the evenings now, my day feels much more mellow and I hold good moods much more easily.
One of the best parts of the day is the walk from the University to Adobe. Usually there are some exceptionally bold squirrels to interact with, some birds to watch darting from place to place, and an entire city to wake up with. I feel like I should be bursting into some pie-eyed musical number half the time. :D Instead, I usually plug in the iPod and listen to something. It takes about 15 minutes, so I can cut an episode of something like "This American Life" into thirds and tackle about one a week. (I save music for Fridays.)
This week I listened to a lecture on "The Literature of Crisis," which is this great course you can download for free from iTunes U.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
malinandrolo turned me onto it, and I'm glad I decided to give it a shot. This week's talk was a "Course Ideas Overview," in which this great Welsh(?) professor talks about what the humanities do, and why their function is so important.
In a nutshell, it boils down to this: great literature allows us to pretend to be other people, from other times, or in other places, and through the differences between their experiences and ours we discover the connecting threads, the timeless qualities that enriches the human experience no matter who we are. From this, we learn how to use our imaginations *and* how to be compassionate. One of the things that really struck me is the idea that compassion is an imaginative exercise, that we're able to have empathy with others by pretending to be in their shoes. This makes sense, but the value of stories being expressed in that direction is both surprising but incredibly natural.
One of the problems that have been nagging at me for the past few years, actually, is the slow erosion of my imagination. To a smaller extent, I've been feeling like I've been less and less able to connect with people on an empathetic level, and that's been bugging me as well. It occurs to me that this might be because I'm reading a lot less, and reflecting less on what I *am* reading. I keep talking about how much I love the story, how much I'd love to learn it inside and out, but I'm not really backing that up with anything.
This will have to be followed up on later. But for now, I'll say that I finally feel like I'm getting puzzle pieces that have been missing for some time. I've known what the problem is for a while now, and now I have the tools I need to fix it.
Distance: 3.27 miles
Top Speed: 6.5 mph
Calories: 341
I forgot how much I enjoyed running! :D Serioiusly, there's nothing better than hopping on the treadmill and listening to some JEW. The stress that's been built up over the week has just melted away. Now I'm up for some pizza, some wine, and some Battlestar Galactica.
My schedule has shifted back to the late hours of the day, which I'm still getting used to. It's actually really nice to get up at nearly seven in the morning, check up on e-mail and LJ, meditate, fix breakfast and lunch and ride in with Ryan. Despite the crunch of the evenings now, my day feels much more mellow and I hold good moods much more easily.
One of the best parts of the day is the walk from the University to Adobe. Usually there are some exceptionally bold squirrels to interact with, some birds to watch darting from place to place, and an entire city to wake up with. I feel like I should be bursting into some pie-eyed musical number half the time. :D Instead, I usually plug in the iPod and listen to something. It takes about 15 minutes, so I can cut an episode of something like "This American Life" into thirds and tackle about one a week. (I save music for Fridays.)
This week I listened to a lecture on "The Literature of Crisis," which is this great course you can download for free from iTunes U.
malinandrolo turned me onto it, and I'm glad I decided to give it a shot. This week's talk was a "Course Ideas Overview," in which this great Welsh(?) professor talks about what the humanities do, and why their function is so important. In a nutshell, it boils down to this: great literature allows us to pretend to be other people, from other times, or in other places, and through the differences between their experiences and ours we discover the connecting threads, the timeless qualities that enriches the human experience no matter who we are. From this, we learn how to use our imaginations *and* how to be compassionate. One of the things that really struck me is the idea that compassion is an imaginative exercise, that we're able to have empathy with others by pretending to be in their shoes. This makes sense, but the value of stories being expressed in that direction is both surprising but incredibly natural.
One of the problems that have been nagging at me for the past few years, actually, is the slow erosion of my imagination. To a smaller extent, I've been feeling like I've been less and less able to connect with people on an empathetic level, and that's been bugging me as well. It occurs to me that this might be because I'm reading a lot less, and reflecting less on what I *am* reading. I keep talking about how much I love the story, how much I'd love to learn it inside and out, but I'm not really backing that up with anything.
This will have to be followed up on later. But for now, I'll say that I finally feel like I'm getting puzzle pieces that have been missing for some time. I've known what the problem is for a while now, and now I have the tools I need to fix it.
