An age-old human superpower and moving freedom a notch every day
New shoes to set me free
So, they finally arrived. I’ve been waiting for them for three weeks now. The only reason it’s taken so long is that the shoes I ordered do not ship to Israel 🙁 I had to pay extra to ship them here and I needed to pay taxes to get them into the country on top of the extra shipment.
Israel claims to be the only democracy in the middle east, and for some strange reason, I had in mind a vague notion of freedom being a part of that promise. Hell, it’s in our national anthem “being a free people in our country”…
Never mind that this means occupying other people for the sake of our own freedom, for what it’s worth. If you have to pay taxes for any purchase of more than 100 US $, where’s the freedom there? And that’s the least of our troubles…Really. I’ll get to these freedom shoes shortly, but first a personal note on freedom.
My personal fight for freedom
No wonder then, that having been born in this country, I feel like I am constantly fighting for my own freedom. I won’t go into the details now, but for various reasons, it doesn’t feel to me that this country, I mean the state of Israel is doing much for its citizens.
Rather, for over 75 years now, Israel is living with J.F. Kennedy‘s motto from his inaugural speech on January 20th, 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
Personally, I am more of a Henry David Thoreau kind of person and firmly believe in his ideas of civil disobedience. It probably has a lot to do with having lost my brother in a war for this country as many things in my life do. In any case, freedom is a basic value for me and has always been. My choice of profession in the past 32 years is another example, circus is a moving freedom-based profession, at least the way I see and feel it in the past 50 years.
Optimal performance and an age-old superpower
So it’s no secret by now… I am somewhat obsessed with optimal performance. I believe I even mentioned that I started running a few weeks ago. Following the MAF method. While following Phil Maphettone’s blog, I ran into, pun intended of course:) a podcast interview of Phil with Steven Sashen which was fascinating, and that brought me to investigate further Steven’s business. More on that in a second, you’ll have to wait for that as I did too…
So now, I’m reading Christopher McDougall‘s by-now classic “Born to Run”. According to that book, we all have this superpower of running, long distances, preferably barefoot or almost barefoot, since we have been wondering the earth in our recent form of homo Erectus.
Suddenly this all comes together right?
Our running super-power, which gives us moving freedom, the MAF method, the fight for freedom. It all makes sense right? Ah, yes, just one last part missing: my new shoes!
My new shoes are Xero Shoes. It took them a very long time to get here, and today they finally arrived. They are on my feet since they came through the door. The fit is perfect and I honestly can say, I feel my freedom scale has moved up a notch since they arrived.
This is one of those presents I made for myself, a reward if you will, for not having given up and ordered the shoes, even though it took some maneuvers and cost much more than their price.
The shoes are worth it, I am worth it, and you are too!
Treat your feet to a freedom-promoting shoe 🙂
