Alumni

I spend the better half of this morning in Guelph, playing ball hockey with my old roommates and some of the younger dudes who are involved with Campus for Christ at the University of Guelph. It was a little rainy and wet, but we had a great time hitting the little orange ball around.

Later, as I relaxed in my warm, cozy living room with Jen, I thought about being an alumni. Going back to places you once were is an interesting experience. You want things to be the way they used to be, the people to be the same, the experiences to happen over again. But it is different. The people are different, some are new, some are gone, the experiences never repeat. In one sense, that sucks. But in another sense, it is good that life moves on. That things change.

If life just played on repeat, that would be terrible. Nothing new, the same people. Like playing the same level on a video game over and over. It is important for people to grow up, get married, mature and eventually grow old and die. Change is what makes life important.

It was great to see my friends again. They are a little older, more mature, more facial hair. Still the same guys underneath though...

Lesson is: Ball Hockey rules.

In Praise of Slow

I recently finished the book In Praise of Slow by Carl Honore who is actually a Canadian guy who lives in London, England. I picked it up when I was dreamily browsing around Chapters, lost in the oceans of books. I really love Chapters.

But I have been doing some thinking about taking life a little slower, and the title grabbed my eye. It was a great book. Some of it was a little stretched to fit the topic, but some parts were really great.

I am not going to summarize the whole book, but the opening two chapters really stand out. They are entitled "The age of rage" and "Do everything Faster". Both chapters give mountains of evidence to demonstrate how fast our society has gotten, how obsessed we are with speed, and how it is destroying us. It really sucks you in.

Let me tantalize with a few quotes:
"our impatience is so implacable that even instant gratification."

"To road rage, air rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage, vacation rage, gym rage. Thanks to speed, we live in the age of rage."

But as for me, what did I get out of it?
I decided that, excepting the Super Bowl, I am turning off my TV for a month. The chapter on leisure blew me away and convicted me. So, in about 2 hours, the experiment begins.