Interviewer: Could you tell me how we should keep fit?
Dr. Davis: Well really what we should do is to try to erm keep fit all round. Now what do I mean by that? I mean er such things as keeping up our strength and our suppleness and our stamina. Now er you may say why do we need all three of those things? Well, erm strength is useful really just so that we erm don't strain muscles or pull ligaments and tendons when we suddenly have to do something er a bit energetic like lift a heavy suitcase or er perhaps er shift a wardrobe or even get out of a chair or a bath. Erm. Suppleness is important er obviously so that you can can bend and and move freely and reach things, again without injuring yourself. And stamina is particularly important so that you can sort of keep going without ... without losing breath so you have you have endurance. One other great plus about developing stamina is that if you er maintain your stamina over a period of years, it actually has an effect of protecting the heart against heart disease.
Interviewer: So out of those three, which is the most important?
Dr. Davis: Well, it depends who you are and what you want to do. I mean, the ... the reason for keeping fit is to keep fit for your way of life, the life you choose. Now, you may say 'Well, if I choose to sort of flop about in an armchair all day watching telly, I don't need to keep very fit, do I?' Well, that's unfortunately not true because there are always times when you have to make a little bit of extra demand on your body. Erm by force of circumstance. You may have to suddenly lift something heavy or move something or may have to er run for a bus or whatever. In which case you could do yourself an injury and you may even actually erm harm something important, like your heart. So it is important to actually to try to keep your fitness a little bit ahead of the sort of erm way of life that you have. Just to give you ... to push yourself just that little bit harder and get yourself just that little bit fitter.
Interviewer: So how do you do it?
Dr. Davis: Well it doesn't have to be all grim and irksome. I mean, people have this view of fitness er freaks you know, who sort of are jogging grim-faced round the park you know, or who are er working weights, doing all sorts of horrible exercises you know. PT ... Very grim indeed. It doesn't have to be like that. To keep yourself fit, or get yourself fitter, which is really what it's about, you just have to do a little bit more each day, erm or even every other day for that matter. By a little bit more I mean erm for instance just er walking a bit more often, a bit further, perhaps getting off the bus a stop or two sooner. Erm perhaps er doing a bit of ... a bit of cycling instead of travelling by public transport. Using the stairs instead of going up in the lift. It's surprising the number of people that erm I see on the London tube who are actually standing on the escalators going down you know, just standing there slowly going down. And the same with lifts. People who take the lift down I mean, that's ridiculous. You should at least walk down, but preferably walk up, because by walking upstairs you actually perform really quite a useful aerobic exercise, that's an exercise that develops stamina, and that's having a beneficial effect on your whole body, toning you up and helping to protect against heart disease.
Interviewer: So it isn't necessary to play squash three times a week or go swimming three times a week?
Dr. Davis: It isn't necessary. Er actually swimming is a rather good way of keeping fit because it's particularly excellent for erm all three of the S-Factors if you like, the strength, the suppleness and the stamina. It helps to develop all three of those rather well, and er it's also a very pleasant and relaxing way to keep yourself in shape. Three times a week would be just about right actually, or even twice a week, or even once a week. Em. Squash though is not a good way to get fit. You have to actually get fit to play squash. Squash is a very demanding game. A very very er energetic game, and in fact you could do yourself a lot of damage by playing squash if you're not in good physical shape to start with.
Interviewer: I have a lot of friends who play sport, and they always seem to have bad backs and pulled tendons, so what would you say to them?
Dr. Davis: I'd say to them they're ... they're going about it the wrong way. Erm. They're forcing themselves into ... into sports, perhaps before they're ready, before they've got themselves in shape first. You have to get in shape to play these sports. Erm. And also for people who force themselves into these things generally. That's bad. Mustn't do that. Whenever you're exercising, or ... or just carrying out some physical activity, never push yourself beyond comfort. Anything that's uncomfortable, don't do it. Stop. Slow down. It's basically got to be fun. I mean, to keep yourself in shape you've got to carry on exercising week in week out, month in month out, year in year out, Now that sounds awful, but if you choose something which you enjoy doing, er, it's fun, then you will keep it up. You see you can't put fitness in the bank as it were. If you don't carry on exercising, all the benefits that you get from exercising will all disappear within about 6 to 8 weeks. All go and you'll be back where you stared so you have to keep it up, and to keep it up, it has to be something you enjoy, it has to be fun. So choose something which you get a lot of pleasure out of, and that way it won't seem irksome at all.
Interviewer: What do you do to keep fit?
Dr. Davis: Ah well, I'm glad you asked me that question. Actually, what I ... I live in London and I work in London, er so what I what I do to keep fit is to certainly do quite a lot of walking. I certainly walk upstairs er a lot, but also I do a fair amount of cycling, er and as I'm dashing round London I I use the bike. I find it the fastest way to get around town and it's er it's really good for keeping in shape. I'm a little worried about the traffic fumes, I have to admit, but actually er it makes me feel very good to cycle around there and I get there on time!
In September bombs went off in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. They were the work allegedly of a group of Neo-Nazis, three of whom now sit in an Idaho jail awaiting trial. While they wait, commentator Clay Morgan has been thinking about the bombings, the bombers and what it all means for his part of the country.
I lived in a promised land. We got trouble here right now. Some Neo-Nazis declared the north-west to be the homeland for the white races. In the past several weeks we've had four bombs blow up. The situation here is serious. I had a hope that they just go away. I was embarrassed by the news coverage. Every time I saw a story, I cringed and thought my God this will make four more of them move here. Then the bombs exploded in Coeur d'Alene. Let me describe these people to you. They are men mostly. They like to live in forts, and dress up like Hitler. They wear jackboots, brown shirts and military caps. They march around and act tough. What they are is evil. These are the cowardly little boys who never grow up. It is our misfortune that they came here. The north-west attracts these people with all the attributes of a promised land. A promised land you see is a place that's far away, isolated and sparsely populated by people who try to mind their own business. The north-west fits that bill. Ninety percent of some of our states are public lands, owned by everybody. That's everybody. This is a place to breath in. The pioneers came here on the Oregon trail. The Mormons came here to practice their religion. The Basques came here to escape poverty and persecution in Spain. Wyoming was the first state to give women the vote, the first to elect a woman governor. Idaho was the first to have a Jewish governor. Now we are attracting fascists like we were Paraguay. Bad things are happening in a good place.
We would like to have the sheriff go to them and say, "Pack up! Clear up! Get out of the state by sundown!" But we cannot. It is not against the law to believe in evil. The white supremacists protected by laws are meant to protect everybody. That's everybody. And we are to keep those laws. We can only watch these creeps and be ready when they make their move. The people who set off those bombs in Coeur d'Alene meant to rob the bank and ransack the armory. But when the bombs went off, the law came down so fast and hard the perpetrators lost their nerve. They got caught. There were several others who were not in jail yet. But we know about them. We can stand up to them. Those bombs did not scare Coeur d'Alene. So get ready for a good ending to a bad story. After all this embarrassment, Coeur d'Alene would be the town that stands up to evil and wins. And this Promised Land, maybe, would drop out the news and we can mind our own business again.
Writer Clay Morgan lives in McCall, Idaho. He comes to us by way of member station KBSU in Voizy, Idaho.
What Your Sense of Time Tells about You (I)Imagine you are a high school principal. A teacher bursts breathless into your office. "There's a fist fight in the lunchroom," she gasps. The responsibility is yours to stop the fight. How do you meet it?
(1) Perhaps you, as a youngster, took part in fights and your present-day ties with students are warm and strong. You can stop the fight because your prestige is high among them.
(2) You have a plan prepared. Other schools have been disrupted so you have already planned a way to stop any fight.
(3) You are totally confident of your abilities in a crisis. You are ready to stride into the lunchroom and take charge without a single qualm. Stopping the fight will be easy.
(4) You fervently wish that you could delegate the job since you know that you're not a talented peacemaker. You wish you could return to the job of planning for the school's needs ten years hence.
One of these four reactions would be the first you'd feel, but only one-not two or three of them, say three psychologists. These psychologists-Dr. Harriet Mann, Dr. Humphrey Osmond and Miriam Siegler-have come up with a scheme for sorting people regardless of their education, age or situation.
The concept is based on the premise that all people have a basic way of seeing time. Each of us is predisposed to seeing all events from one time vantage point. Either it reminds you of the past (past-oriented), how the event fits in to today, yesterday and tomorrow (time line), what it is today (present), or how it will develop (future).
The three began working in 1968 when Dr. Mann and Mrs. Siegler were assistants to Dr. Osmond, director, at the Bureau of Research, New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute in Princeton. Dr. Osmond is currently devising ways to make empirical studies of the theory and Dr. Mann is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writing a book on the Worlds of Time. Their take-off point was an interest in observations made by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who described in the 1920s the temperamental differences of four psychological types. Jung is known as the founder of analytic psychology. Since Jung's work in 1921, however, no one had conceived of a theoretical framework that would account for the four types. Without such a framework, there was no possibility of substantiating that people of different types experience the world very differently. Time and space are the touchstones in the system. Each person, after all, uses his time somehow and exists within and acts upon the space around him. Dr. Mann and company propose that certain traits are shared by persons falling in each of the four categories.
The first type, the past type, sees time as being circular. For him, the past crops up in the present and then returns to the past as a memory. He enjoys collecting souvenirs and keeping diaries. He tells stories about Great Aunt Hattie and always remembers your birthday.
Past types are pegged by this system as emotional people who see the world in a highly subjective way. For instance, School Principal I (past type) could identify with the fight and know how to handle it because of some past experience-whether it be similar fights as a child himself or ones previously dealt with as the school principal. In addition, past types usually follow strict moral codes and often are valued more for what they are than for what they do. This quality itself-because it lends authoritarian strength to one who possesses it-might cause the students to quit fighting. Past types often have been found to be skillful at assessing the exact emotional tenor of an event and are adept at influencing others' emotions, according to the Mann group.
Research reveals that many past-oriented people are flexible in early years when they do not have much of a personal past to draw upon. However, the dash of youth is often replaced by a need for stability and usually is rooted by age thirty-five or so. From this age onward, they are conservatives.
"They need to see things in the ways which were popular, fashionable and appropriate in their younger days," explains Dr. Mann. This applies, with exceptions of course, to personal taste in clothing fashions, music appreciation, and other social and environmental factors. In short, the past type often clings to the well-established way with nostalgic verve. Also, the past type finds it difficult to be punctual since the on-going feeling is more important than his next task.
The goal of these people is "to develop a language of the heart, rather than of the mind. To develop those techniques which make memories live, and to dignify any act of remembrance; those are the essential concerns of past-oriented types," explain the authors in the Journal of Analytical Psychology. |