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Jogging Through Sheol

If you know me, it might come as a surprise that I’ve had half a dozen gym memberships over the last five decades. Those memberships were rarely about getting in shape. They were almost always based on the provision of some activity that interested me.

Of all the gyms I’ve belonged to, only two were ones I regretted leaving and they were both in the same building, but forty years apart and run by different franchises. More about that in a minute.

Resolution / Shmezolution
My guess is that you’re at least giving some consideration to joining a gym at the first of the year based on the excess sugar you’ve ingested over the holidays. Don’t do it! January and February are the highest income and lowest profit months for gym owners.

They’re high-income because of all the resolution junkies that join at the first of the year. They’re low-profit because of all the extra maintenance resulting from all those extra bodies. Gyms are seriously over-crowded with temporary members during January and February.

By March, the New Year’s resolutions lose their luster and those exercise vagabonds move on to other self-improvement schemes. Meanwhile, most of them assuage their guilt by keeping the membership alive for several more months — the high-profit months for local gyms.

Pumping away at those exercise machines while we listen to “I Did it My Way”, we’re determined to improve ourselves by ourselves. But the problem with those resolutions is that we’re polishing up the outside without addressing the issues inside.

We’re just trading one addiction for another. Even if the new addiction makes us better looking, we still end up like those whitewashed tombs — pretty on the outside but still full of decaying dead stuff on the inside . We’d be better off spending those gym membership dues on a good psycho-therapist.

That Perfect Gym
In 1979, I joined North Star Racket club, a small gym offering ten racket ball courts. I joined the gym so I could play racket ball three mornings a week with some fellow gym members before we went to work. Unfortunately, the gym went out of business after a few years and we never found a suitable replacement. Those friendships, on the other hand, lasted.

Forty-five years later, with the goal of rehabbing a knee I’d recently broken, I joined a Golds Gym that reopened in that exact same location. Golds had replaced the racket ball courts with stationary bikes, rowing machines, treadmills and a horde of weightlifting apparatus.

Even more important than the equipment, several guys my age tended to be there at the same time I was, and we got to know each other. We had some excellent discussions while puffing away on stationary bikes and treadmills.

Those relationships and discussions paid far higher dividends than the calorie burning. They led to lasting friendships and exposed each of us to diverse perspectives we’d never have encountered otherwise.

Automatic Transmissions
How’s that for shifting gears? A few months ago, I was leaving the house and the automatic transmission on my truck refused to shift out of first gear. Nothing is as terrifying to me as a problem I’m helpless to solve on my own.

Over the last few years and thanks to the Great Courses Series on Audible, I’ve gained a rudimentary understanding of things like quantum physics, genetics, neurology, and cognitive science, but believe it or not, the Great Courses Series doesn’t offer a single lecture on automatic transmissions. Those devices remain an enigma to me.

As a result, I dropped my truck off with a trusted local mechanic and he came back with the news that I needed a new “mainframe flow sensor”. It was as expensive as it sounded but the new device solved the problem and I was once again, on the road.

In essence, that flow sensor assures that fluid flows into a specific gear mechanism at exactly the same rate fluid flows out from that mechanism. Otherwise, the whole thing explodes and creates a far more expensive mess to clean up.

In a lot of ways, you and I are just like that transmission but with a leak. If we don’t have an adequate external supply of both moral and scientific influence flowing into our brains, we just keep repeating the same old herd-speak to everyone we meet.

We also need an equivalent of that mainframe flow sensor to regulate the stuff inside our brains. Whether we’re talking about theology, philosophy, politics, business, or transmissions, we need a trustworthy outside influence to help moderate our tendency to misinterpret all that information in a way that serves only our egos.

So, who cares what resolutions you and I made for the new year? The real question is,”What did we learn last year that we can share with each other and wrestle through the implications together?”

As far as my assertion that relationships pay higher dividends than exercise, I challenge you to find a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and read the intro story about the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania.

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A meeting of great minds who think alike