The Interweb Quote of the Year!!!

One thing this blog’s kinda been known for is the quotations peppered through its posts...often making its original writing pale in comparison, but, then, so it goes...(Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five). Of course, in this, it's taking part in that greatest of postmodern practices, which has flowered so fully on the interwebs: using other people's stuff for lack of anything original to express. So, in honor of all that, the staff here would like to share the first (and probably last) annual Yoga for Cynics Interweb Quotation of the Year!

Certainly, in the year 2011, nothing else came close to the profundity, timeliness, or sheer ubiquity of:

Something I never actually said.
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thank you, thank you.

Runners Up include:

The timeless:

Something kinda new-agey I certainly didn’t say, and that probably wouldn’t really fit with my philosophy or beliefs, either...
Rumi, the Buddha, and/or Albert Einstein

And more topical:

Something I did say, but taken so far out of context that it seems to mean the complete opposite of what it meant in-context.
Barack Obama

And, finally, who could forget:

Of course we’re going to riot....What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?
Student, Penn State, November 9, 2011

Happy new year, folks...

The Critical Importance of Flexibility

Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.
(attributed to John Lennon, T. S. Eliot, and Bertrand Russell)

...sleep, I find, is a chore when I need it,
but an indescribable luxury when it’s time to get up...

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever—

this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
Albert Einstein

...similarly, nothing makes writing harder
than having good, solid reasons to write...

Almost all of my epiphanies over the previous fifteen years
had been the same one: I don’t know.
Stephen Cope

...the worst thing to do if you’re trying to be more flexible,
it turns out, is to try to be more flexible...

Today I Wrote About Nothing

All all the trees go piff
all all the rocks go paff
all all of nature poof.
Daniil Kharms (from Today I Wrote Nothing)

If at first an idea isn't absurd, There's no hope for it.
Albert Einstein

...all in all, doing nothing’s a lot easier when I’m supposed to be doing something...particularly if I have a precise idea of what that something's supposed to be...then I know just what to ignore...(even if I can never really ignore it completely)...and if it’s something I really don’t feel like doing...or, better yet, a whole bunch of things I don’t feel like doing...which, alas, is the case most of the time...almost anything can serve as a distraction...and the hours go by like...nothing...

...but seriously doing nothing...focusing on doing nothing...doing nothing with a sense of purpose...with discipline...that’s a different matter entirely...then, suddenly, everything I could possibly be doing instead seems to intrude as if by some kind of deep imperative...check the oil, clean the bathroom, buy some cheese...run for president, get a sex-change, find out what it’s like to eat a whole pocketful of sand...though, of course, if I quit meditating with an imperative to get all of these things done in a timely and efficient manner...most likely I’ll be right back to nothing in no time...

...started meditating again...like, a day or two ago...half an hour a day.......okay, twenty minutes........

Is It Time?

...some time ago, when I decided to start doing the yoga thing everyday, was really gung-ho...impatient...so really started pushin’ it...and, in a couple weeks got myself to a point where I pretty much had to avoid anything involving knees or lower back, or twists...which, as it turned out, didn’t leave much...

...the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one...
Albert Einstein

To find our way, we will need to pay more attention to this moment. It is the only time that we have in which to live, grow, feel, and change. We will need to become more aware of and take precautions against the incredible pull of the Scylla and Charybdis of past and future, and the dreamworld they offer us in place of our lives.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

Time is making fools of us again.
J. K. Rowling

...more recently went to this class in West Philly with this teacher named Dhyana...getting a bit frustrated, as I tend to do...after all this time spent workin’ on this yoga shit...almost hurting my neck trying to force a tripod headstand...and the teacher started telling this old story....this guy goes to see a Zen master and asks him how long it’ll take to reach enlightenment...the Zen master says thirty years...the guy says I can’t wait that long...listen, I’ll do anything...just tell me how I can get it now...and the Zen master says okay then, seventy years...

Biking With Einstein

I thought of that while riding my bike.
Albert Einstein, on the theory of relativity

...was gonna go get coffee then bike downtown...stepped outside to check the weather...no rain drops falling but a sound of thunder in the distance...decided to have my coffee at home...

...between the endless cold/flu/whatever and the endless rain, I haven’t gotten to bike nearly as much as I’d like lately...and, when I have, have tended to overdo it a bit...what I like most is to take a fifteen to twenty mile ride along the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River, stopping for a yoga class and at one of those Indian buffet places for lunch somewhere in the middle...that covers a lot of bases...

...overall, yoga is highly complementary to biking...though the opposite really isn’t true at all...at least not in a physical sense...

...there’s something about having the body occupied with the bike that seems to allow the mind to wander more freely than usual...maybe it’s because of that one part of the brain that’s closely monitoring...hopefully...where the bike is going...keeping it from going into walls or over concrete abutments...and, most of all, watching the devious, potentially deadly movements of cars...with all that on its plate it can’t possibly watch where the mind goes, too...

Biking the Back Roads of My Mind

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world.
Atul Gawande One time I was riding my bike to work in Ithaca, New York, by a slightly different route than usual, and decided to cut across a parking lot. I got distracted, looking off to the side and remembering something about the last time I was there, and, all of sudden, was lying face down on the pavement. My bike, meanwhile, was tangled in the chain that, as it turned out, was across the entrance to the parking lot. Picking myself up, I realized that blood was pouring down my face. It wasn’t, however, until after a brief conversation with a passerby who had a cell phone and offered to call 911 that I saw the strikingly unnatural direction my left middle finger was pointing, and, like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff but not falling until he looked down, felt a sudden, overwhelming rush of agony. Two fingers turned out to be dislocated, and my first and second metacarpals broken badly enough that, in order to hold the bone parts together until they healed, the orthopedist needed to insert four “pins”—called that because nobody’d show up for surgery if they called them nails, though that’s what they were. So, for a month and a half, I had four metal hooks sticking out between my knuckles—kinda like Wolverine, except, rather than being able to hold my own against evil mutants, I couldn’t even button my pants.

But that’s not my point. What I meant to write about here has to do with the part I don’t remember, that period of a second or two when a number of really unpleasant things happened. What those things were can be inferred from the above, but they’re not my point either. My point is that I didn’t lose consciousness, but all that happened seems to have been instantaneously forgotten, as if it never happened, except for the obvious and painful consequences. It’s as if my unconscious said “you don’t need to see this” and pulled a dark curtain, and that was that. The mind, in other words, didn’t simply receive outside reality, but edited it.

Speaking of biking, right now I’m preparing for a two-day 150 mile ride, benefiting the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, on September 27-28, from Cherry Hill, New Jersey (near Philly) to Ocean City, NJ (right on—you guessed it—the ocean) and back—except that, being a masochist, I’m planning on doing 175 miles—a “century” the first day, 75 the second. The photo at the top of this post shows me pre-training, pre-yoga, and here I am now:
For more info, check out:
http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR/Bike/PAEBikeEvents?px=5393304&pg=personal&fr_id=8150