News and Exercise
The daily news at my annual migration nesting grounds across the Atlantic is not good. Merkel’s intentions on refugees are honorable but her management of the situation is wanting. Similarly, the US is embroiled in an ugly war of words and deeds over refugees and immigration. Then there is football and the ouster of the German team from the 2018 World Cup! The first time in 40 years that the team did not make it to the second round. It is ironic that the competing World Cup teams appear to include a healthy mixture of ethnic and racial diversity. Millions of TV viewers are comfortable with the mix and enthusiastically identify with and root for their teams. This sentiment is reminiscent of NIMBY — not in my back yard. To paraphrase, the famous footballer Zidane on the French International Team who reportedly said, “When we win I am French, when we lose, I am Algerian.” Shortly after Germany’s humiliating exit in the first round, Ozil, a star on the German national team, resigned. He reiterated the earlier Zidane sentiment by saying “He is a German, when we win, but am an immigrant when we lose.
According to the NY Times — much earlier in 1922 — Albert Einstein said in a speech in Paris: “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”
All this is unsettling to a ten-year-old immigrant some 71 years ago. I see the problems on both sides of the Atlantic. It is hard to ignore the habit of watching or listening to the latest breaking news stories. Fortunately, the pleasant summer weather in Bavaria is helping to refocus our attention on healthy exercise and away from the ugly news.
In 1978 Christl on the boat, Solveig, acquired a ship’s barograph — a wind-up clock driven pen recorder of barometric air pressure. Ever since her sailing days, she has kept a daily ship’s log of weather conditions filling up many notebooks. In 2004 she moved the barograph to our apartment and continued recording weather logs in our farming village. The logs include barometric pressure, temperature, wind, sun and cloud patterns . . . and lately our hiking and bicycling activities. These include shopping errands, cafe runs to a nearby village, an occasional Starbucks hike in Munich, and walks around town. The car sits unused in an underground garage for weeks at a time.
Christl keeps a coded log of our exercise program on her daily weather log and I keep a spreadsheet of monthly averages — times per month, distance covered, elevations, and Metric/Imperial conversions. The BikeBrain App on my smartphone records both biking and hicking distances and elevations and provides maps of our routes. The pictures show a short 1.6 kilometer walk we take several time a month around the restored thousand-year-old town wall that is now lined with chestnut trees along an ancient moat — partly filled with water and home to goldfish, carp, ducks, and black swans.
We both think about our exercise and good health. It helps keep a lid on the sad breaking news. The spreadsheet also reminds us of a quote from Albert Einstein — another immigrant: “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
