Take a look at this photo of a “traditional” German beer bug.
We picked up the mug in Bavaria a few years ago. At first inspection it looks like a typical souvenir knick-knack that you might buy in Munich at any one of the dozens of souvenir shops near the city center.
But take a closer look at the characters and scenes depicted on the mug. I especially like the scene toward the bottom…the one where the one guy is walking on his hands.
In fact, if you look closely you’ll notice that this mug depicts the various stages of inebriation. What looks like a nice and respectable decorated souvenir from Bavaria, turns out to be a comical tribute to Bacchus the Roman God of drink and debauchery.
BTW: Don’t even look at that little scene on the bottom right side with the guy on his knees just in front of the standing women holding her arms above her head. You really don’t want to try to explain that one to the kiddies.
My point is that if you saw this beer mug on my shelf, you probably wouldn't think twice about it. Your perception would be that of just another typical souvenir from a long forgotten vacation.
Here’s another example of when perception changes. Almost ten years ago we moved from downtown Boulder to the outskirts of town. We lived just one block from Pearl Street and best of all all of the shopping, restaurants, bars and night clubs of downtown. As an example for all of you big city types, it would be like living one block from Michigan Avenue in Chicago, or one block from Times Square in New York.
It was perfect.
We could go out late at night and stumble back home after a long night out on the town. When our son Tommy was born, my wife wisely suggested that it was time to trade the downtown condo for a suburban house. I hated the idea of leaving the center of town. I really loved being in the middle of all the action and close to everything that I thought was important. We had lived that same way in Prague…right in the heart of the oldest part of the city and close to everything.
So it was with some fear and trepidation that I started the new house hunt. We soon realized that we could never afford a house anywhere near the city center. It was the same problem with a larger condo. We were in fact lucky to be able to even live downtown as home prices were just beginning their upward skyrocket as the high tech bubble drove the local housing market upward.
I remember to this day the first time we drove through to what would eventually become my new neighborhood. It was a new suburban sub division that was being built on the edge of town. I thought to myself that never in a million years would I live so far from the center of town and in this fine example newly minted suburban hell.
Ten years later I’m still here. It turned that I had very little choice in the matter given our budget and my fevered determination to stay in town.
It was my current neighborhood or nothing.
The funny thing is that I probably couldn’t afford to buy into my neighborhood today. Prices in Boulder have gotten so high that I consider myself very lucky now to live in town.
But the stranger thing is that after about a month of living on the outskirts of town my perception of this location completely changed. What once was the middle of nowhere quickly became a short ride to downtown.
In effect that map in my head completely and utterly changed. The distance to everything I valued like the mountains and local parks just flipped, and what I had considered to be the middle of nowhere became a neighborhood just a few short miles from downtown. I believe this happens to all of us at some point.
For instance, it is how a local friend of mine can easily commute several hours each day to and from his job. I don’t think that he considers it vary crazy that he has to drive across all of Denver just to get to his job every day.
It is the reason that many of my old Chicago friends don’t think that an hour commute to work each day is too bad. It is that same reason that (especially in big cities) like Atlanta and Los Angeles, what were once considered outlying suburbs and commuter communities are now considered close in towns and neighborhoods.
I’m thinking of all the turn of the century towns that surrounded our big cities. These places were once considered the suburbs or even the country, and are now the best newly fashionable central inter city neighborhoods. Our perception of these places changed overtime, and when that happened so did the market value of the homes in towns like Brooklyn, New York and Oak Park, Illinois.
For me that same mental switch happened sometime over the last few years regarding exercise. I thought of this today as I was on running on the treadmill at 6:00 a.m. doing my first indoor speed running workout of the year. A few years ago the idea of just getting up at 5:30 in the morning would have been something so silly that I probably would have called a friend to have a good laugh.
“Guess what Steve, I actually though about getting up this morning before the sun and going for a very hard run. Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve heard all year?” I would ask, as I hung up the phone with my buddy and went back to bed for a late morning snooze.
But today, it seemed perfectly natural and normal to get up and get in an early run before my lunchtime swim. In fact, I was grateful to be able to take my wife’s place at her speed workout and get in some early morning running.
What’s even stranger is that I feel like my body wants and indeed needs at least an hour of rigorous exercise each day. I really hate it when because of work, travel, sickness, or other commitments I’m not able to swim, bike or run for at least an hour a day.
Do you remember the old government guidelines that stated that we should exercise at least three times a week for a half hour to stay healthy and fit? That seems completely crazy to me now. My body and mind seem to thrive on hard physical exercise. After an hour of early morning swimming, running, or biking I don’t really feel tired, instead I feel sharp and bright like a well oiled machine.
I’ll stop right now because this is getting very close to sounding like one of those late night infomercials for the Bowflex or Abodominator machines that eventually end up keeping the dust bunnies company under your bed.
My point is just how much my perception of exercise has changed, and how much that change has affected my daily outlook on working out. Just like the thought of living in my current neighborhood 10-years-ago seemed completely crazy, so the thought of working out once a day for at least an hour would have seemed completely insane just a few years ago.
I recall a conversation on a group run in the old days when somebody pointing out the triathlete in our small group and said how completely crazy she was because she was going to bike home after running 10K. Funny thing folks…today I’ve become that crazy triathlete.
What I’m trying to say is that if you don’t consider an hour commute to work crazy, I hope you understand why I don’t consider a daily one hour workout crazy. Plus, if you have to commute an hour to get to work…at the end of the day you still have to get home.
It’s just a simple matter of perception.