Back to School, Again.

Hello Friends,

Just dropping a quick note here to let everyone know that I am back in school, and on my way to finishing the Fitness Technology program at PCC. What this means for me is less sleep, more homework, and gaining lots of useful knowledge about how our amazing bodies work, and how to make them function most effectively. What this means for you is lots of quick blurbs from me about all the cool stuff I am learning and simple instructions regarding how to applythis cool stuff in your daily life.

While I know you all enjoy my random 700-word  rants on the evils of capitalism or the importance of community building, I am going to work on bringing a specific focus to this blog in the coming months. I am going to scale back the word count a bit, and hone in on a variety of topics related to personal health and fitness. Your personal level of health, wellness, and fitness is easily the most important, but often the most neglected aspect of daily life as a human being. Through this blog, I have the opportunity to provide you with information that may help you understand the importance of taking care of your body, and a plethora of ways to accomplish that task. Because I intend to become a personal fitness instructor, I will use this blog as a forum to discuss the huge variety of physical activities that can be employed to achieve fitness and wellness, as well as some dietary and nutritional measures that can be used to help our bodies perform optimally.

I am looking forward to sharing this great new adventure with you, and I welcome the chance to interact with you and engage in meaningful conversation. If you have some ideas or questions about what topics you would like to see me address, please email me at tobias.shea.livingrevolution@gmail.com, find me on Facebook, or leave a comment here. In the mean time, check out my “Get Fit Here!” page, and get to work! Until next time…

Until next time…

On The Psychological and Physical Value of Novel Experience

Hello Friends,

Summer continues to roll by, and I continue to enjoy the wonderful weather we are having in Portland. Reading in the sun has been a large part of my life recently, so I have a few updates for the reading list that you should check out. I have also been able to get out and play in the sun, so there are a few nifty workout sessions that will be posted on the Workout page. I am learning how to program physical activity, and learning how to design activity sessions that are effective, challenging and fun, and this process is forcing me to think creatively about how the human body functions. This process is teaching me how valuable it can be to THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX and challenge the dominant paradigm, whatever that may be. Which brings me to today’s post…

If you are anything like me, you probably do not consider yourself an “average” person. You probably do not use the terms “normal” or “common” to describe yourself, and you may pride yourself on maintaining an individual identity that in many ways defines you as unique.  You may have habits and patterns of behavior, but you thrive on spontaneity, you enjoy being present and you do your best to live in the moment. You recognize challenges as opportunities for growth, and you relish the opportunity to test your limits, be they physical, psychological or emotional. Constant change keeps you on your toes, and you thrive on learning more about yourself from each new experience you encounter. You are an explorer and an adventurer, and live life to it’s fullest at ever opportunity.

If you see any part of yourself in the previous paragraph, then you already understand the importance of constantly varying the physical and psychological stimulation in your life. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, I’ll try to explain myself now.

Evolution has hard-wired the human brain to recognize patterns and develop mental models about how we interact with our environment. As we interact with our environment repeatedly, the brain develops habitual behaviors and mental “stereotypes” about our interactions with our environment. In the grand scheme of our existence, this process allowed us to remember which berries were poisonous and which were yummy. It allowed us to recall directions from one frequented location to another, and even today, it hopefully prompts us to react appropriately in life-threatening situations. Unfortunately, once these mental models are developed, it is difficult to retrain the brain, even if our environment has changed drastically. Also, the more repetitive our lives become, that is, the less frequently we experience novel stimuli, the less our brain has to work in everyday life, the simpler our mental models become, and the less we actually have to THINK.

Fortunately, most of us still possess the ability to choose freely what we do with out lives. We can make the decision to seek out challenge and novel stimuli, or we can make the choice to sit in front of a television and devolve. We can make the choice to live mindfully, consciously weighing options and thinking critically about how we interact with the world around us, or we can allow ourselves to be inculcated with a heavy sense of apathy by popular media and advertising. We can continue to follow the destructive, ineffective patterns that have developed in modern society, or we can reevaluate the impact our species is having on this planet and choose to break away from the old patterns in favor of new, creative, effective ways of behaving.

What is so beautiful and difficult about this process is that it doesn’t stop unless we choose to let it stop. As long as we put in the effort to achieve positive change, we will continue to learn and grow. As long as we continue to hypothesize and experiment, as long as we continue to challenge commonly held beliefs, as long as we are willing to risk our comfort for unknown rewards, we will continue to learn more about ourselves and the world around us. There should never be a point when we stop testing limits or pushing boundaries. For those of us who possess the intestinal fortitude, this process should part of every day we exist. Step outside your comfort zone, loosen your grip on what you think you know, and question everything. Who knows what you may discover!

Until next time…

Peace.Tobias.

Did We Forget How To Survive?

Hello Friends,

Last week, I blogged about a book I read titled “Deep Survival”. The basic premise of that book suggests there are innate characteristics in people that either a) predispose them to be survivors, or b) predispose them to be destroyed by their environment. The book is much more complex than those simple statements, though, and much of the research is based on extreme circumstances that often could have been avoided with proper preparation and some forethought.

This week, I read a book titled “Everyday Survival”, written by the same author, Laurence Gonzales. The tag line for this book is “why smart people do stupid things”.  This book takes a more general view of how human beings have survived to become the most dominant species on this planet. Gonzales also questions the physical and psychological systems that have evolved to sustain life on this planet, and he investigates the role human beings play in the functioning of the universe. The main premise of this book is that human beings have evolved to believe we can control the environment around us, and that we are somehow separate from and superior to the other inhabitants and processes that make up our “known, physical reality”.

Gonzales uses this book to caution against what he calls a “vacation state of mind”. At some point in our evolution, human beings forgot how to exist symbiotically with the environment around us, and adopted the mindset that we are in control of “our” environment and can bend the forces of nature to our will whenever we desire. “Everday Survival” explains how terribly wrong we are.

As I worked my way through this book, more and more questions came to mind, and I became more and more frustrated with the evidence Gonzales presented. As a species, are we really re-programming ourselves to on such a grand scale? Are we truly forgetting how to interact positively and effectively with the natural environment? Have we really convinced ourselves of the foolish notion that we are the literal and metaphorical center of the universe, despite all the contradictory evidence? How did we get so confused, and how did we get this far off-track?

In modern, industrial society, we have constructed a series of boxes that now exist as our “natural environment”. You wake up in your boxy bed, in your boxy house. You find your food in an artificially cooled box, then you cook your food on another box using flame-less fire. Then you drive your boxy car to your boxy office, and spend the next eight hours staring at a your boxy computer on top of your boxy desk. Then the whole process reverses itself, and you end your day staring at another flashing box for a few hours before you fall back into your boxy bed in your boxy bedroom. Like a vast majority of modern humans,  you never experienced hunger or danger or pain. You are essentially numb to the world around you, because every day, life unfolds “the way it is supposed to”, and you are never presented with the opportunity to question that fact or challenge that fact or deviate from the simple, stepwise processes we have created for ourselves. Seriously, what are we doing to ourselves?

Not only is the lifestyle causing our brains to devolve, it is slowly diminishing the value of anything that could be called our “soul”, as well as conditioning human beings to exist without consciously and mindfully interacting with the world around them. Our bodies are wasting away from eating nutrient-deficient foods, not engaging in enough physical activity, and lack of stimulation from (and interaction with) our environment. All out little boxes keep us well-protected, and so we are never provided the opportunity to question our mortality, or test the limits of our physical bodies, or employ our mind to work our way through complex intellectual problems.

What does it mean for our species if the premise of this book is true? What will happen if we continue down the path we are currently on? The picture looks a bit dim, but we still have the opportunity to change our course.  How do you stay connected with the natural world, and what are some benefits that you derive from spending time away from the hustle and bustle of modern life? What do you do to get that jolt of epinephrine that let’s you know you are alive? How do you remind yourself of your place in the Universe? Drop a comment, and tell me how you keep your mind right in the modern world. Until next time…

Peace.Tobias.

Burning Bright

Hello Friends,

I just finished reading an amazing book. “Deep Survival” is a thorough analysis of the psychology and physiology the help some people survive harrowing situations, and cause other people to give up and die in the face of adversity. If you can be described as an “adrenaline junkie”, or if you have an entire closet devoted to adventure sport gear, or if you constantly find yourself seeking new experiences through which to test your personal fortitude, then this book is for you.

While I have a whole bunch of my own thoughts about adventure sports, seeking new experience, and testing personal fortitude, I am going to cheat a bit and simply post the last few paragraphs of the book here. The author, Laurence Gonzales, finishes his book with some simple, poignant words that speak to the core of the human spirit, and SHOULD inspire any armchair adventurer to get up out of their seat and grab life by throat. I hope you find some meaning in these powerful words, and I hope they inspire you to get up from your computer, get outside and DO SOMETHING!

“The perfect adventure shouldn’t be that much more hazardous, in any real sense, than real life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break. We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer. Or we can take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information and then go forward in the knowledge that we have DONE everything we could.

No, some people would rather not see it, but the bull is there for all of us. Some of us choose to pass the cape in front of it’s horns. To live life is to risk it. And when you feel the rush of air and catch the stink of hot breath in your face, you enter the secret order of those who have seen their own death close up. It makes us live that much more intensely. So intense is it for some that it seals their fate; once they have tasted it, they just can’t stop. And in their cases, perhaps we have to accept that the light that burns brightest burns half as long.

But I believe that if you do it right, you can have it all. I adhere to what my daughter Amelia calls the Gutter Theory of Life. It goes something like this: You don’t want to be lying in the gutter, having been rundown by a bus, the last bit of your life ebbing away, and be thinking, ‘I should have taken that raft trip…’ or I should have learned to surf….’ or whatever it was you should have done.

A man named Pete Conrad was the third man to walk on the moon. He died in a motorcycle accident on an ordinary day. It took him a while to die as he went to the hospital. I wonder what he was thinking. I hope it was: I DID IT ALL.“

If those words don’t get your heart rate up a bit, you might want to have yourself checked my a physician. Just last week, I went through my entire contact list, trying to get enough people to come spend three days rafting the Lower Deschutes. I heard a whole slew of excuses, and I was disappointed that more people didn’t jump at a chance to surround themselves with the natural world, and perhaps get a chance to be confronted with their own mortality. We all need more chances like that, and we should all take those chances more often, because it reminds us how fortunate we are to be alive, and how blessed we are to understand our own fragility.  I hope you are all enjoying the summer as much as I am, I’d love to hear about some of your adventures. Please drop a comment, or find me on Facebook, and let’s start a conversation. Until next time…

Peace.Tobias.

Summer Update

Hello Friends,

Wow, summer is flying by, isn’t it? My writing has taken a backseat to playing outdoors and enjoying the sunshine, so it has been a while since I updated the blog. I finally put in the time and effort to get  my email address, Youtube account, Facebook account, and the blog all on under similar domain names, so if there is any confusion about how to find me or any of the content I post, just google “tobias shea” and “living revolution” and you should be able to find me.

How is your summer progressing? Are you taking every opportunity to create some adventure or maybe get in a bit of trouble? I hope you are, and I would love to hear about it, so please drop a comment here, find me on Facebook and drop a note, or email me. I feel like I haven’t been as social as I want to be this summer, and perhaps it is time we spend some time catching up.  So drop me a line and tell me a story! To be fair, here is a quick recap of some of my recent adventures!

The summer weather in Portland has been HOT this year, so my first task was finding some way to keep the kids entertained and cool at the same time. We tried our little sprinkler in the back yard, but the kids were bored with that in a short time. I didn’t want to spend the money on a small plastic pool I knew they would destroy, so Melissa and I decided to take them down to the waterfront to play in the fountain.

There was quite a crowd, and it was hilarious to watch Tyler, Taylor and Maddie trying to convince other kids to run through the fountain. We brought some snacks with us, and spent a couple hours hanging out in the shade by the fountain, taking a pleasant, (albeit, short), break from the sunshine and heat, and a good time was had by all.

A trip to the fountain is a nice way to kick off summer in the city, but Alix and I needed to get out in nature, so we planned a quick roadtrip that would allow us to get in some much-needed alone time outdoors. We found a TOOL concert in Sacramento that gave us a good reason to drive through California, and decided we would take a few days to ourselves. The entire trip was amazing, and the concert was incredible, but we also had the opportunity to take some great pictures and find some clarity.

We ended up driving WAY TOO MUCH in four days, but we both had a great time, and we pulled off a mini-vacation without too much serious effort or drama.  It was also nice to spend some time as a couple, without the kids or work or school or anything else to worry about. Alix and I have very few opportunities to do that anymore, and our road trip reminded us both how important it is to occasionally take some time away from the rest of life.

Most recently, a few of the fellas were able to get away from the world for a few days and enjoy some time on the Deschutes River. My family has been rafting the lower Deschutes between Warm Springs and Maupin for more than 20 years, and we were lucky enough to squeeze in a “Man-Trip” this year. There are few rules about what defines a “Man-Trip”, but it is mandatory that there are “no kids, no dogs, and no women”. The participants change every year, and this year it was nice to have a fairly mellow crew. My dad and I each drove a boat, and we were joined by my brother-in-law Zach; his friends, Ezra and Cal; and a family friend, John.  We spent three days on the river, winding our way through picturesque canyons, and the arid grasslands of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation and it is always a humbling experience to be surrounded so completely by the elements. The whole weekend was an exercise in simplicity and I am always amazed at how few “things” I need to be entertained and well-taken care of.

I arrived back in the “real world” last night, and now I officially have the rest of the summer WIDE OPEN! I have already completed everything on my summer to-do list and now I am excited to see what adventure comes my way next! I hope your summer has been as interesting and fulfilling as mine, drop me a line or two and let me know what you have been up to. Until next time…

Peace.Tobias.

More Changes!!

Hello Friends,

You may notice the address for this blog has changed slightly, as well as the address for the Facebook account linked to this blog. These changes are my attempt to streamline my communication with you, my faithful readers, as well as the rest of the Internets. More changes will be coming soon, and hopefully, the process will be more effective and more efficient. Thanks for your patience through all the changes, and thanks for your continued participation in the Living Revolution! Until next time…

Peace.Tobias.

http://tobiasshealivingrevolution.wordpress.com

Preventing Play Poses Peril to Pre-pubescents

Hello Friends,

What a nice alliteration, don’t you think? Too bad it conveys such an unfortunate message. I recently read an article in the Oregonian which disturbed me, and I wanted to take some time and give you my two cents on the subject, and hopefully start a conversation.

The Portland Public School system has actually suggested cutting Physical Education classes for a majority of Portland Public schools in the coming school year. Can you believe that? Apparently, there is something like $19 million dollars that will be cut from next years budget, and since many school have already removed their creative arts and music programs, PE classes are next on the docket. Why is it always about the money? Seriously, whose pockets are being filled at the expense of our kid’s education?

This budget cut could potentially eliminate as many as 65 teaching positions, adding to Oregon’s already high unemployment rate, as well as increase the workload for classroom teachers, who would be expected to “offer students the opportunity for movement and activity during the school day”. It can also be assumed that the number of fat kids in Portland would also jump dramatically, and no one really wants that, do they?

All joking aside, how can anyone think this is a good idea? I am not well-versed in Oregon’s tax system, or the trickiness of macroeconomics, but I think it should go without saying that actively preventing children from engaging in physical activity and play, for whatever reason,  is a bad idea.  Because this is an economic and political issue, it also makes me wonder about the effectiveness of a system that would consider taking such drastic negative measures against future generations. It makes me wonder about the intentions of people who were elected as political representatives, and who have power to make decisions in situations like this that can affect the lives of millions of people. It makes me wonder about the profiteers who will, no doubt, benefit monetarily from deals like this. It makes me wonder about our priorities as a community, and question whether we know what is good for us as a species. It makes me wonder, as an advocate for social justice, why it is always the poor schools who must give up their art programs, and their music programs, and their PE programs? It seems wrong on so many levels, doesn’t it?

My son just finished his first year of public school. He will be entering the first grade in September, and he will be attending public school. Knowing that he may not be “allowed” any time to express himself in a physical way worries me. He is extremely active, and learns best when he can move around and interact with his environment. Physical play also helps balance his energy levels, so he can sit relatively still and pay attention when he needs to. I don’t like the idea of him being cooped up all day in a classroom, and I don’t think he would enjoy it either.

Tyler graduates from Kindergarten

So, what are some ways we can fix this? How can the people of Portland, on a community level, take direct action to prevent this from happening to our school? How do we bypass the bureaucracy of city government and contribute to a positive solution that can serve the best interest of everyone involved? I have a few ideas, if you will please indulge me…

1. As parents, or rather, anyone who cares about the physical and mental well-being of a child, we should take some responsibility and make a concerted effort to play with out kids more. Spend time as a family, being active and engaging life on some physical level.

2.  Re-evaluate our methods of mass education and socialization, and see if there aren’t some changes we could make that might be more positive for children who are the population of those systems. Perhaps we are not teaching our children in the most effective manner, and perhaps the content of what we are teaching them is not as interesting or intellectually stimulating as it could be. Perhaps, by conforming to some kind of standardization, we are killing their creative spirit, and showing them a skewed way of interacting with the world around them

3. Change the kind of government and economics we practice in consumer capitalism. How is possible that our teachers are paid so little, given the significance of their job? How is it possible, that we cannot tax ourselves appropriately to ensure the community has access to such simple amenities as health care, decent education, and livable wages? How is it possible that the people elected to represent the rest of the community can offer legislature that would surely lead to negative, unpleasant effects for their constituents? There are so many other questions that could be asked, but I think you get my general opinion, right?

What are your thoughts? Is this happening in other places as well? Do we see this as part of a growing trend of behavior? Are there simple solutions we are not implementing that could prevent scenarios like this? Drop a comment and let me know what you think. Until next time…

Peace.Tobias.