Back To School Time Is Resolution Time

When I smell the ragweed pollen this time of year, I think of the first week of school.  The school playground in my childhood was covered with it the first week of school, before it got stomped into dust by thousands of feet about the fourth day or so.  There was no grounds-keeping except what the feet of children did.  And with that smell comes the old habit of thinking of the possibilities of new beginnings, learning new things, trying to do it better.  

And I saw the black birds, starlings, red-wings, probably a cow-bird or so, have started flocking together three days ago, which is also a sign of fall coming.  Now that I'm officially old, that carries its own set of things to think about.  Ok, I'll say it, death.

Here's Krista Tippett's latest show about the spiritual significance of running.  I'm way too old and too achy for running and I couldn't possibly care less about winning a race or any other sporting event, but there's a lot more than that to the show.  I've never understood why anyone cares who wins and who loses.  I never understood what was good about a sporting event in which half of the poeple participating and half or the people watching it hoped the other half did badly.  In music you hope everyone does well, all of the time, that is unless there's something wrong with you.  In sports something is wrong with you if you don't want "the opponents" to do badly.  

The emphasis on games in phys-ed classes, winning and losing, teaches all kinds of really rotten values, one person wins, lots of people lose and a lot of the people who are good at something win all the time when lots of people who aren't good at it are constantly taught that they are losers, with all of the baggage that carries.   Athletes in the news don't demonstrate that the lessons of winning make people moral.  Jocks are, in many, maybe most cases, conceited jerks.  Lots of them are bullying ass holes. 

But if there is something else that is part of it, meditation, reflection, moral reflection, that makes it something worth doing.  Of course, if they tried that in public schools someone would either have a hissy-fit, with lawyers, or someone would worry about someone having a hissy-fit-with-lawyers and it would never get started.  So the dreary, regimented, coercive, sports oriented phys-ed regime will probably turn off more children to staying in good health through moving.  And the screen-based childhoods of a lot of them really need to be overcome if they're going to escape the miseries of aging.  We've got to get our schools out of the hands of the jocks and the jerks as much as we do the corporate managers, if there's a real difference. 

Here's the Soundcloud podcast of the program which goes on to a talk with Stuart Brown, about the possible relationship of deprivation of play in childhood and murderers.  The University of Texas bell-tower murders figure into it.  It's interesting to think about but I don't think it's the science that it's presented as being.  People have very limited abilities to understand the thinking of animals, even ourselves.  I don't know exactly what they mean by "play" but what is talked about doesn't match what I've seen of sports, at least for the majority of people who engage in it.  And I wonder how much of the understanding of what was observed didn't have the ideas of human sports imposed on them.  As for children at play, much, if not most of sports, seems to me to be a product of trying to please adults and conforming to gender roles, the coercive aspects of that.  Imagination, imagining things that aren't structured and regimented doesn't come into it much.  I'd take as much play as possible out of the context of sports. 

Games are always a good walk or run spoiled.   I think I'll go out and walk through the ragweed and elderberries.  Watch the birds flocking.   I'm spending too much time sitting down, again.  Maybe I'll think about Psalm 73 while walking, too.