I have two jobs now, as a personal trainer and as an editor at Sierra magazine, the publication of the not-for-profit Sierra Club. All morning I roam around Marin, meeting Bob for a run or coaching Cathy through a set of pushups. In the afternoon I head to San Francisco to an office on Second Street and climb four flights to my cubicle, where I tap at a keyboard and talk on the phone.
This situation is extremely strange. Here’s some pictures that convey the strangeness.
Work at this office pays the big bills…
…but to save the environment, I work here.
These are the tools of my swanky job…
…and these are the implements of my nonprofit job.
In an idle moment at my manual-labor job, I look up at this…
…and at my “green” job, I contemplate this.
This tells me that that things have gone so awry in America that the important work, even that which saves the world, compresses us into light-starved cubicle-crawling gnomes, with the best antidote being a foray into the outdoors for some fresh air. Once there, people have so thoroughly forgotten how to move that trainers like me are needed, to remind them how. No wonder our environment is in need of saving.
yep.