Exercise and Irish Poetry

"Exercise not only changes your body, it changes your mind, your attitude and your mood."

“The only bad workout is the one that didn’t happen.”

“Once you are doing exercise regularly, the hardest thing is to stop it.” - Erin Gray

Remember the importance placed on exercise by astronaut Scott Kelly in his guidelines for surviving isolation:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/21/1929880/-Astronaut-Scott-Kelly-s-tips-on-how-to-handle-isolation-are-priceless

There are other things that help, as indicated in this article from the goodnewsnetwork.org

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/science-says-you-should-say-happy-during-covid/

However, exercise is also good for your heart and this is all about heart, if we want to make it through the pandemic. Lucky us, we have a member of our dialogue network, Brian Seaman, who is a personal trainer and has offered to provide us with posture and fitness help through our Zoom dialogue events that are now taking place each week. (The Zoom sessions were set up with the help of Shinobu, Greg, and Robert.) Other exercise options include exercise in place, following the moves of Little Eva

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKpVQm41f8Y

or of Jacques Brel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP0N-UdKXAM

So there you have it: Brian Seaman, Little Eva, and Jacques Brel. I know you can hardly wait to get started, but I wanted to share a poem by John O’Donohue (1956-2007) that Grace had sent to me. Also, I’ll append below this message a book synopsis you may have seen quite some time ago, because Viktor Frankl's words seem astonishingly apropos just now, confined as we have been to our isolation camps.

Here’s the poem by John Donohue

This is the time to be slow, Lie low to the wall Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let The wire brush of doubt Scrape from your heart All sense of yourself And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous, Time will come good; And you will find your feet Again on fresh pastures of promise, Where the air will be kind And blushed with beginning.

The book synopsis is appended below. Next week I’ll send you a short story of mine. Take good care of yourself in all sorts of ways. Arthur

Book: (Viktor E. Frankl) Man’s Search for Meaning (1959, 1962, 1984, 1992, 2006)

“…for at any time each of the moments of which life consists is dying, and that moment will never recur. [And isn’t this] a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives? It certainly is, and hence my imperative: Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.” - Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Cey-UZX-E

A bestseller is one thing, a classic is something of a higher order. This book is a classic that has influenced my life ever since I first read it many years ago. Perhaps it even saved my life, for reasons you will be able to guess after you read this synopsis. Perhaps, if you read the book, it would be as important to your life as it was to mine. Let me know.

In an excellent Foreword to the 2006 edition, Harold S. Kushner writes: “Terrible as it was, [Frankl’s] experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it….”

The book is well under 200 pages in length. Part I, by far the greater part of the original edition, is entitled “Experiences in a Concentration Camp.” Uncertainty, hope, despair flit across the mind of the person being taken for the first time to the concentration camp. The inmate who is physically able will be set to work, often hard labor under life-threatening conditions. Most of what he values – perhaps a wristwatch or (in Frankl’s case) a manuscript which had been an important part of his life’s efforts to that point – will have been taken from him. (The women, for example Frankl’s wife, will have been sent to another camp.) Only infrequently would he work in anything related to his previous life. Often the work would be in harsh weather, even in the snow. His meager rations, his inadequate clothing, even the difficulty of getting his shoes on over swollen feet, would steadily erode the remaining margins of his very existence.

As a human being and as a psychiatrist, Frankl tried to find ways not only to maintain his own resilience, but to encourage the strength of others. That required showing them some future goal. Frankl quotes Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

Between Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945 the death rate in the camp had increased far beyond its usual, apparently because many of the inmates had thought they would be home by Christmas. Yet there had not even been any encouraging news. That was probably the decisive blow to whatever will to live remained for many of them. “I have nothing to expect from life anymore” was a typical response from the person so near the end.

“What was really needed,” writes Frankl, “was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Furthermore, for each individual, the specific challenge will be unique. Under better conditions – conditions such as you, the reader, may currently enjoy – the opportunities for creativity and for love may be far greater than for any of the inmates, yet each of you like each of the inmates will face a unique field of opportunity and of difficulty. And when because of their incarceration, an inmate has their suffering as their only remaining opportunity, again that person’s own suffering will be unique to the specific circumstances, and no one else can take his place. “He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. …His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

“For us, as prisoners, these thoughts were not speculations far removed from reality. They were the only thoughts that could be of help to us. They kept us from despair, even when there seemed to be no chance of coming out of it alive. Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.”

In Part II, “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” Frankl summarizes a vast experience as a psychiatrist and neurologist, particularly with thousands of potentially suicidal patients, in concepts intended to inspire creativity and not to teach dogma. Logotherapy focuses on the patient’s future in an effort to help him or her find meaning in her or his own life. This may uncover an inner tension in the patient’s life rather than equilibrium, and this inner tension is essential to mental health. You yourself must discover the meaning of your particular life, which is always unique and specific. Moreover, the meaning of your life is constantly changing but never ceases to be. At some time in your life, your suffering may escalate, and in such times your ability to find meaning through your suffering can also grow stronger. Yet suffering is by no means indispensable to finding meaning in life.

In his 1984 Postscript, “The Case for a Tragic Optimism,” Frankl writes: “Let us first ask ourselves what should be understood by ‘a tragic optimism.’ In brief it means that one is, and remains, optimistic in spite of the ‘tragic triad,’ as it is called in logotherapy, a triad which consists of those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death. …How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that? …I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from [the fact that life is transitory] an incentive to take responsible action.” The closing words of that Postscript gave me an overarching historical compass that I have used to find direction in my life: “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So, let us be alert - alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”