Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Spring Cleaning

It wasn’t a pretty sight to see me in my smalls at 6:15 a.m. this morning, valiantly pulling upon the cords of the Concept 2 stationary rowing machine in the dreary basement beside the washer and dryer (how unlike the television ads for the product), staring straight ahead (as if there were any other choice in the matter), intent upon completing my 30 minutes of exercise. My protuberant belly all but squeezed me uncomfortably on the forward pull. The CBC radio morning show in the background (at least what little of it I could hear over the whirr of the fly-wheel) did nothing to distract me from the half-hour eternity which stretched before me, as I disparagingly eyed the seconds ticking by with glacial speed on the mounted performance monitor.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Getting Religion

It is inescapable, especially to the Christian observer, that the arrival of Spring is about more than the awakening of the seeds in the ground. It is also about the rekindling of the fires of religion within one's mind, or should I say within one's heart. The debate about the intuition or rationality of religion is never ending, all the more so at a time when it is fashionable to blame religion for all the world's problems. In an increasingly educated society, it is considered lower class (perhaps heralded by Karl Marx' conjunction of religion and the masses) to adopt traditional religious models. Moreover, as the world's religions are thrown more and more into the face of one another, it seems just plain unfair to suggest that one man's god is better than another, and thus to reject them all. However, as someone who has had a blocked heart and lived to tell the tale, I am not as clear about the rejection of some of the possibilities of religion. I don't for a minute suggest that my survival was a religious experience (it was purely medical), but it reminds me of the importance of matters of the heart and the free flow of the cardiovascular system. Sometimes one's heart can be blocked by more than material matter.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Nice Day

Today promises to be an exceptionally beautiful day! It is now 6:00 a.m., and I have flung open a window in my study to admit the fresh morning air. The sky in the east beyond is a lapis blue, and the sun is already on the horizon, seeping its pink light into the Heavens. The streets are dry, though I doubt for long, as the temperatures rise and the roadside snow banks begin to melt. This of course is an important consideration for those of us who prize a clean automobile, at best a fleeting novelty in a Canadian winter. How I envy the Floridians their dry roads!