I've been working a little too hard. Maybe a lot too hard. I've been spending too much time juggling too many projects. I'm always quite busy with projects but with the holidays and all manner of special events, well, let's just say I look forward to the long busy days where I at least get to relax a little in the evening.
I believe in determination, in sticking with the grind until it ends, in drawing strength from times of hardship and strain. I believe in mind over matter, as the saying goes. And alongside that mental strength, I believe in exercise and the development of the body to support the riggors the mind goes through.
I'm not alone in that. Socrates is said to work his body hard and in turn, it sharpened his mind. Perhaps the most famous of statements about that practice comes from the latin text of Aulus Gellius entitled 'Noctes Atticae', or Attic Nights. Aulus Gelliu was a Latin author and grammarian, who lived from 125 - 180 AD. He was educated in Athens, after which he returned to Rome, where he held a judicial office. Attic Nights is his most famous work. It was a compilation of notes on grammar, philosophy, history, antiquarianism, and other subjects, preserving fragments of many authors and works who otherwise might be unknown today. He wrote on Socrates:
His temperance also is said to have been so great, that he lived almost the whole period of his life with health unimpaired. Even amid the havoc of that plague which, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, devastated Athens with a deadly species of disease, by temperate and abstemious habits he is said to have avoided the ill-effects of indulgence and retained his physical vigour so completely, that he was not at all affected by the calamity common to all." [Bk II, I.I]
I believe in determination, in sticking with the grind until it ends, in drawing strength from times of hardship and strain. I believe in mind over matter, as the saying goes. And alongside that mental strength, I believe in exercise and the development of the body to support the riggors the mind goes through.
I'm not alone in that. Socrates is said to work his body hard and in turn, it sharpened his mind. Perhaps the most famous of statements about that practice comes from the latin text of Aulus Gellius entitled 'Noctes Atticae', or Attic Nights. Aulus Gelliu was a Latin author and grammarian, who lived from 125 - 180 AD. He was educated in Athens, after which he returned to Rome, where he held a judicial office. Attic Nights is his most famous work. It was a compilation of notes on grammar, philosophy, history, antiquarianism, and other subjects, preserving fragments of many authors and works who otherwise might be unknown today. He wrote on Socrates:
"Among voluntary tasks and exercises for strengthening his body for any chance demands upon its endurance we are told that Socrates habitually practised this one: he would stand, so the story goes, in one fixed position, all day and all night, from early dawn until the next sunrise, open-eyed, motionless, in his very tracks and with face and eyes riveted to the same spot in deep meditation, as if his mind and soul had been, as it were, withdrawn from his body. When Favorinus in his discussion of the man's fortitude and his many other virtues had reached this point, he said: "He often stood from sun to sun, more rigid than the tree trunks."
His temperance also is said to have been so great, that he lived almost the whole period of his life with health unimpaired. Even amid the havoc of that plague which, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, devastated Athens with a deadly species of disease, by temperate and abstemious habits he is said to have avoided the ill-effects of indulgence and retained his physical vigour so completely, that he was not at all affected by the calamity common to all." [Bk II, I.I]
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