….Random Elliptical thoughts!

I’ve had to reduce the intensity of my cardio so it’s not uncommon for me to drift off while I do my elliptical workout!  It’s also true I have a very vivid imagination. That’s been the one skill most responsible for any success I had with my career.  It also can get me unnecessarily panicked or sick to my stomach in anxious overload!

Lately it has just been fun to hang around in my imagination, since its almost always harmless, playful and kinda funny. Once I’ve gone 1/3 of the way through my elliptical workout, I always start to wander.  It’s amazing what will trigger the kind of journey my brain will take. Today was pretty funny to me…and if you read it and really think about it…its a logical journey that made sense!

It all started with a buzz around my head. Then from the corner of my eye, I see the wasp who just came through the open door.  It flew directly to one of the screened and open windows that line the south wall of our gym. You could tell it was desperate to get free and return to the wild, just on the other side of this wire mesh thing stopping it.

My first thought was…I should kill it! I had just been stung in the morning  walking on our wood sidewalk. I must have disturbed the colony building its new hive under the board and shaded from the hot sun. It would be fair to kill it, since the sting it gave me stung like a son of a gun!

It’s weird my first instinct was to kill it? I’m the guy who makes every effort to carefully collect and release the spider that made it way into our house and was crawling across the tiled floor. What an interesting instinct to come from a guy so non-violent! I mean, it’s really what nature is and does! Do I really want to be the person who kills it though…just because?

Let be real…if this frantic insect was out in the wild, it’s a very real possibility it would likely have flown into a spider’s web and then be part of a dinner! It’s kinda basic rules of nature and instinct for animals…kill or be killed!  Hmmmmm….

Hold it..is that why people hunt?  It’s just the basics…instinct? The idea of killing some wild prey for your food, although primitive in this day and age, was what you had to do to survive. That would make sense, except that we aren’t in that day and age, so I don’t get it.

I eat meat!  We’ve raised our own chickens for a number of years so we can know how they are raised, fed and cared for. However I have never felt ANY urge to grab a gun and shoot something that I know I can find running wild on our 160 acres. And I have now decided that I really can’t just kill this wasp for no reason, without trying to save it somehow.

I decide it is now incumbent for me to be the better living thing.  I need to evolve past my basic and instinctual urge and save its life. I put the elliptical on pause and stepped off. I walked over to the middle window and grab a tissue from the box sitting on the ledge. The half full box sat just beneath the panicked and desperate living thing slamming itself over and over into the almost invisible screen. Gently I scrunched up the kleenex so as to trap it inside the little pouch I had deliberately constructed. I slowly closed the edges of the tissue and carefully carried this now peaceful and calm insect. I couldn’t hear the buzz and admittedly I was a bit panicked…had I accidentally killed it? Today while I was drifting off and at a point when my imagination turned a bit profound, I saved a life.

I have gotten past the point of dreading my regular workouts and they’ve become something to look forward to. I have even begun to enjoy these random elliptical thoughts as my mind wanders.  Sometimes it’s a bit too random and hardly makes sense…but you understand how this thought process flowed…right?  Its okay…it made sense to me and before I knew it, I had understood evolution, nature, hunters and I had grown beyond my instinct. Surprisingly, just seconds after I started with the wasp buzzing past my face, my workout was complete!