I never understood why, in certain movies, they depicted kids as fearing gym class. Sometimes they completely hated it. As far as I can remember, it was one of my favorite classes of all. It helped that I was athletic. It seems for a good portion of the time, we played dodgeball, and not to toot my own horn, but I was typically the winner. It always came down to Richy Nisewarber* and me — starting in grade school and all the way through high school. We fiercely fought it out to the very end.
Perhaps it was the word that people don’t like. Gym, of course, is short for Gymnasium. A weird little word. Gymnasium comes from the Greek gumnazein, which means “to exercise naked.” I am surely glad we did not have to exercise naked, as I would have definitely feared that. As a sidebar, people who suffer from gymnophobia have a fear of nudity and not a fear of playing dodgeball in a large, cold room. But the word gumnazein fits in fine with those Ancient Greeks, who were also the inventors of the original Olympic Games. Truthfully, I think the Greeks did a lot while they were buck naked way back then.
Now that I reflect back, I liked most of my classes — the information contained therein, not necessarily the teachers. It got tricky with having nuns and being in a Catholic grade school. Some of those nuns were not very nice at all. Yet, the schematics, the hierarchy went as follows. It went from God, to the Pope, to the Priests, to the Nuns, to you. So any animosity felt toward a nun was then laden with guilt. I mean, they were in the ever-important God chain of communications. And the conundrum worsened from that point. I was torn whether or not I should reveal these sins in confession or risk being punished by the priest for my dislike of Sister Mary Gertrude.
I think I kept it all to myself and took the anger out in gym class when we played dodge ball.
That’s how it goes sometimes. When we are in a situation that upsets or angers us, it sometimes will ripple through to the rest of our day or comes out somewhere else.
Another thing about grade school were the chores. As I recall, there were only three jobs at the end of the day, and we all took turns doing them. Cleaning the chalkboards, beating out the erasers, and taking out the garbage. My least favorite was eraser duty. If it was a still day outside, it wasn’t so bad. But no matter the conditions, there would always be a layer of chalk dust on my uniform when I was done, not to mention the inside of my nostrils. And I really hated doing it in the cold, or rain.
The job I didn’t mind was taking out the trash. There was something I liked about emptying the can into the big green dumpster. We didn’t have to lift up the lid. Most of us were too short for that anyway. No. There was a little door on the side that slid open. It felt very covert to me, like I was in and an episode of Mission Impossible, and I had to put secret contents of my can into the larger, more secret container. Or, maybe I just liked emptying out the can for a fresh start.
Now there’s some advice. It seems, lately, I find myself getting upset over the state of the world, or more succinctly, the state of the minds of certain people (oftentimes on social media). Somedays, I use the “dodgeball” approach and hurl a remark right back at them. But. Maybe the best thing I can do is to simply throw away the garbage. Completely empty my mind of all the crap, and clutter, and waste. And leave it there, out in the dumpster. Figuratively. Their comments are of no value in my life, so I can put the trash where it belongs. And leave it there.
You know the old saying, “Everything I know I learned in Kindergarten?” Well, everything I know has been a constant flow of learning from the moment I was born, and it is still sweeping over me each day. It is, after all, a journey, not a destination.
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‘It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.’
— Claude Bernard
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‘You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.’
— Lyndon B. Johnson
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‘What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create.’
— Buddha
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*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
