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All You Need Is Love

Thursday, December 30, 1999

Human beings are planners. In the beginning the fulfillment of our dreams seems far away. Eventually the time passes, and the thing planned for becomes reality. My time, the plan that I made a full year ago and have thought about every day since, is finally upon me.

It was with good purpose that I took this week off work. The time has allowed me the mornings to care for numerous personal matters. I'm a veteran list maker. I have so many lists that I wrote some software to organize all my lists and notebooks into a common format and interface. All week I've been striking things off lists, catching up on Real Life.

Yesterday morning was quiet at home. I had to get up early to take an older lady friend who has been sick and needs help to get her car fixed. It gave me a jump start on the morning.

Cyra-Lea, too, is an admirably organized, disciplined, and hard-working person, a trait she inherits more from her mother than from me. She has spent her winter vacation buried in the book Peak Fitness for Women by eight-time Ironman Triathlon world champion Paula Newby-Fraser, a gift I brought her from visiting the US Olympic Training center in Chulla Vista, California, in September, 1998. It's taken her until now to get around to it, but she's only two chapters from the end. As a nursing student with an outrageous aptitude for understanding and remembering scientific information, I'm sure she's taken the sheer volume of physical data to heart. She's probably memorized it and will spend the next three weeks reciting it back to me.

I'm happy that her interest in fitness is on the increase. Parents are supposed to do things with their children, sharing their lives with them. Not a few parents think this means coming down to the level of the kids---going outside and playing ball, and doing the stuff kids like, including sometimes mindless things that kids do because they're kids and don't know there are better things to do. While some of this is good, I've always encouraged parents to teach their children constantly. Personally, I've played kid's games with my children few times in their lives. Instead, I've preferred to teach them to love the things I've come to appreciate myself. As I've said to them both, parents can share with their children only what they have to give.

In my case, what I've had to give to my children is a love for spirituality, music, the arts, reading, education, and the skills to be self-sufficient. In recent years I've tried to be an example in matters of physical fitness. We can't make our children take up a program of regular training, especially if they haven't done it as a matter of habit since their earliest years. But seeing Dad's enthusiasm for and the benefits received from running has certainly rubbed off to some degree. I regret that I didn't discover that area of my life earlier. This was something that my own parents did not have to share with me, so I had to learn about it in adulthood.

Aaron is now 26 and has lived on his own for several years, so hasn't been mentioned much in this journal. At one time, before he could afford to own a car, he was a cyclist who competed in biathlons, sometimes obtaining age group hardware. I can't claim to have had much of a role in bringing this about, but I'm glad to see it, and hope that he pursues it more in the future, now that he's attained greater affluence and consequent softness.

In the last two months Cyra-Lea, who is five feet tall, but was carrying more than her optimum weight, has lost nine pounds merely by doing sensible things, and has been hitting her workouts with renewed enthusiasm. Perhaps running the marathon relay in Tucson and working around incredible runners as she did Tuesday, has primed her enthusiasm. I'm hoping she'll learn to give physical health a high priority while she's still young, something neither her mother nor I did until much too late in life.