You may already know that, in many of my jog log blogs, I’ve been writing about my thought experiments contemplating different positive words while necessarily infusing the significantly increased emotional force of my physically hard-pumping heart, lungs, arms & legs that jogging brings.
This jog predated the ARGUS-EYED jog that was my last post.
My arbitrary Facebook “Positive Word of the Day“, on this day, was “Prevoyant”. A word that I would never choose from a list that means “far-sighted; foreseeing; or prescient”.
The primary feelings of most positive words are elementary to comprehend but what on Earth are the feelings of foresight?
I’ve experienced genuine prescience just twice, perhaps the subjects of a future blog post, but for different reasons the feelings of the events are near impossible to draw upon.
My academic thoughts, while jogging, regarding foresight were that, as a 220 lb. 65 year-old man with a compromised heart and a twisted spine (scoliosis) I must jog through a lot of pain and I’m aging disquietingly quickly. At some point in the relatively near future I can foresee having to give up jogging, for which I’ve developed great affection, due in part to cultivating great positive feelings while pumped.
At one point in my jog around Burnaby lake, returning by Cariboo Dam, there’s a private little-used bench, overlooking a field, offset from the trail upon which I usually take a meditative rest. On this occasion the bench was occupied – I had not seen that coming.
The next bench, by a lake outlet lookout, is on the main trail and, while unoccupied at that moment, it’s a more popular bench to sit on. I chose to stretch my back upon the seat of a picnic table more in the middle of the field; a good place to contemplate being prevoyant.
There was a little untouched pile of bird feed on the corner of the table.
About 15 people in one Asian group descended upon, and surrounded, the lookout bench thus verifying the wee prevoyant foreseeability of its popularity. Emboldened by that I took an ample bit of bird seed with me daring a prevoyant avian meeting to occur on the final leg back.
Not too long thereafter I came across a really tiny bird, with a half-long bill and fluffy feathers. It was wriggling in a dust bath close to the side of the path and it let me get right up beside it, closer than most birds would, before it flew away. I jogged onward a bit before realizing that this must be my forecast bird feeding encounter.
When I turned around the tiny bird was back in the dust bath which gave me the perfect coordinates whereupon to drop the birdseed payload. I just hope the little thing was pleased rather than thinking “WTF did you do to my wonderful dust bath?!?”.
That was it. A somewhat mediocre experience contemplating the adjective prevoyant – until now.
Weeks later I suspect that I’ve incurred, from jogging, a medial meniscus tear in my left knee which could well mean that my jogging days are now abruptly behind me. My plans are to try out some Urban Poling hiking poles, of Scandinavian origin, that reduce body weight impact on knees by 20%. Unfortunately I can no longer count on pumping myself up physically with my heart and lungs from more vigorous cardio exercise and will have to try to rely more on pumping up mentally with heart and mind.
This means that the jogging thoughts about the word prevoyant that I had thought were the most academic; about my getting too old to jog, turned out to be the most impactfully prevoyant. They predicted that my jogging ability would end, and it did, like a switch.
