Last night I was inspired by a man in speedos. His name is Jerry Davis and a local news station in Portland showed this scantily clad man jogging between the piles of snow on the streets of Chehalis, Washington. This is the genius that inspired me - he said that if he's not improving himself, he's working on dying and he's too young for that. He is almost seventy years old and there he is, jogging much further and faster than I could dream.
People in the town have not always been very supportive of Jerry, but that has changed over time. Some were disgusted by his presence, while others were accepting from the start. A quick youtube search about this man will reveal what I'm talking about. We can be so judgemental about each other until we take the time to get to know each other.
Which brings me to something that has been on my mind. I noticed a large amount of complaints on fb about newbies populating the gyms to the tone of "Damn them with their resolutions! They're taking up my space and time!" and scowling remarks as the resolutionists walk, instead of run(HOW DARE THEM!), on the tredmills. This evidently has the same effect on the regular gym goers annually as they eagerly wait for the resolutions to fail after a few weeks. I know because I was one of the regulars one year.
I had joined the gym in November and had been going regularly enough by New Year's that I considered myself to be one of them...kind-of. I was somewhat between the two groups. I simply began my resolution a couple of months ahead of New Year's crowd, so I was somewhat of a resolutionist-in-disguise as the hardcore regulars accepted me into their group. Well, should I really say accepted? It was more like the trainers would call me by first name and acknowledge my presence, I recognized the faces of the men who loudly grunted in the far corner with the free weights, and I was acquaintances with the guy who looked like Nino from the movie Amelie and an old man named Charlie. None the less, it was significantly different from my previous gym going experiences (I did an ethnography about joining and going to the gym as my thesis for an Anthropology class a couple of years before this and had an extremely different result). Anyway, I felt this time around that I was entitled by New Years. Entitled to scowl at densely populated gym as I went inside. Entitled to getting my time on the tredmill without such a long wait. Entitled to see these new people as a passing fad. Entitled to see them as outsiders and not belonging.
It felt good to feel this way. I felt better than them. It was ugly, hateful, childish, and false, but it felt good to my weak confidence. It declared that I was one of the group, an insider at a gym! WOW! What an amusing thing this was! Yet, I had to shun these feelings of entitlement out, because I knew what a lie it was. I knew that I was one of them and they were me...I had only got lucky for the time of year in which I had joined. It was as simple as that.
True to fashion, guess what happened? I came down with a horrible cold mid-January and stopped going. The end. I followed my old pattern right along with the some of the resoltionists, and confirmed to the regulars that I was laboring all that time in a disguise.
So anyway, the whole point of this long post is to bring up the myth and reality of Outsider/Insider mentality. It is a real division if we believe it is. It is a cohesive social device in a group. One of the ways in which we establish this social glue is to exclude others. It is an ugly device in human nature, but it's there. The bottom line is that this is all false thinking. We know it is. We know there are no outsiders and there are no insiders if we use higher thinking. Jerry Davis is a spandexed one of us. The resolutionists are only the regulars in an earlier form. We need to have patience and handle each other carefully. They are us and we are them...yeah, the ending of V for Vendetta thing.
After all, if we're not supporting each other in improving, we are supporting each other in dying, and we're all too young for that.
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