The Race In Malibu & In Our Nation

Ecclesiastes 9:11 "I returned, and I saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,...nor favor to the men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all."

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's another rant by yours truly!! Race day is in two days, and I'm nervous. Yes, I'm nervous. I'm nervous because I get nervous at times when it comes to running races. Anything can go wrong before you race and certainly when you're actually racing, and in some instances, after you've finished. For those of you that don't know, I sustained a low back disc injury in the aftermath of last year's run of the Malibu Half marathon. I was told by my neurosurgeon I was likely not going to walk normal again. He said that I was likely never going to run again if I didn't get surgery to remove a large chunk of the disc that broke off from my lowest lumbar disc and lodged itself in the outlet for one of the more important nerves used in walking and running. He even told me that I was going to have to come to grips with this new life status and find other things that could keep me healthy and consider transitioning into a different profession if it didn't get any better.

Well, I did not believe be him. I could not in good conscious just surrender to one man's opinion of me or even a panel of people (as having assembled in my past) to tell me what I could or would not be able to do with my life. This is why I became a doctor. So I too could have an opinion, and I'm just not the kind of man to accept a handicap carte blanche. With some doubt and an iron will, I worked on the very real problem facing me. Step by step, I worked on walking. Eventually, this led to some mild running. Nothing more than a few yards at a time, and eventually those yards grew to block lengths. Then a few blocks, and eventually a mile. I thought I was going to stop and be satisfied that I had proved that surgeon wrong, and maybe I should've been satisfied with what I was able to do. All I really wanted to do was run the Zuma beach stretch without stopping that I couldn't actually do for a number of months essentially losing a bet with myself that led to a different one; I would sign up for the very race nearly ended my running career if I could make it to 10 miles without too much trouble or keep growing my beard till I ran the race or however much of it I might complete. Like I mentioned after having run a number of full marathons in my life that anything could happen, but I bought the entry just in case because I am the kind of man that will show up come hell or high water and see what happens.

 I did this knowing that I would likely be running alone, but that's life. Sometimes the road you have to travel on is narrow and has to be run alone, and only you see that it's the way out of personal defeat. Only you understand that it is necessarily the way back up on to your 'feet' so you can start shaking the dust off of you.  As of today, I still have a largely white beard on my face, which means I did not make it up to a 10 mile training run.  Hopefully, Sunday is the day I get to shave it off! Who knows?! Right? I'm kind of enjoying people opening doors for me cause they think I'm super old or something! Hahahaha. With no real expectation, I hope to see some of you along the raceway.

There is another race being run this upcoming week leading up to this coming Tuesday. Namely, it is the mid-term election races. It's the race that will continue to help us as a nation define what kind of America we are or want to be. As I listen to the news coverage, and the number of issues facing our nation, I was reminded of a few speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr.  "Progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it is gained by the hard work of a dedicated few." MLK. I used to think that the dedicated few is the conservative Christian groups, which I'm happy to say I was apart of for a number of years into my early adulthood. I did this till it became more obvious that like everywhere else in society there is a class system in place. Incidentally, the people that were in leadership happened to be fair skinned, generally heard from the Almighty more directly than anyone else about everyone else but themselves. Yes, there need to be people in the pew as well as someone in the pulpit, and like our democratic system, it is the people in the pew that decide who it is that will fill the pulpit because they want that magical 10% of everything the Almighty has given you.

The message may come from the Almighty, but you better believe that the person preaching it is responsible to all the people that are wanting to listen to the message and not just the version of the message that the messenger wants us to hear! We've learned through history that some messengers want to keep people oppressed, divided, and it can be that the messenger is out of touch with the message itself or in denial of it because they also have to abide by what the message dictates, and it, the message, has to align itself with what the book says and the spirit of what the Almighty is trying to achieve. And whenever we think of God or the Almighty, we have envision a being that is working to bring the disconnected aspects of our reality together into a harmonious whole. Anything different than that should be subject to question and recall.

This is also true of the President, the constitution, and we the people. It's time to go back to the book and the constitution and bring it back to what the founding fathers intended for us as people to live by. I'm going to vote for the first time in California, and I hope all of you, where ever it is, take the time to exercise your American right to vote! God Bless America!! There it is.