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Life, Racquetball & Croquet |
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A good life is a life of balance. Prayer and practice, fun and seriousness, spirit and body, work and leisure: all combine to make life meaningful. As a professor at Clarke College, my life is both joyful and busy. The days literally fly by! Whenever I can, I go home for lunch. There I tidy up the house, do the dishes, lift weights, and get caught up on the happenings of All My Children. These relatively mindless activities are a great counterweight to the busy intellectual challenges of the rest of my day! As good as this is, though, nothing completes an eventful day as effectively as physical activity. Four evenings a week I play racquetball and one evening I have croquet league, yes, croquet league. Twelve different friends of mine play the former late each afternoon. We usually play doubles; this means four men hitting a ball as hard as we can in a small, enclosed space. An hour of this is quite a workout and often we have the bruises from being struck by the ball to show for it! While racquetball is viewed as a legitimate sport I often take some heat for being in a croquet league for over 20 years. Somehow the backyard, family picnic variety of this game has tarnished it for the truly serious practitioners! Real croquet has no less strategy than a game of chess and requires great accuracy in ball striking, not to mention the cost of fine equipment in the form of a professional mallet. It can even be played indoors as well as outside! As I reflect upon the ultimate value these leisure activities hold for me, I realize it is neither about the exercise involved nor the stress relieved. The greatest joy is the camaraderie. Friends make life sweet, and I wouldn’t give up these leisure activities for the world! About the author: BVM Associate Norm Freund teaches philosophy at Clarke College, Dubuque, Iowa. Norm and his wife Marabeth are the parents of two sons, Josh and Gabe. Return
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