Pointless exercises. Sounds just like me.

I realised that I am taken with doing pointless exercises.

In high school while the class was trying to learn how to do something I worked out days before, I would build word puzzles or draw pictures of fighter jets or geometric shapes.

All were pointless and all ended up in scrap.

But there's a beautiful symmetry to that, like building a sandcastle on the foreshore, or even an ice sculpture.

So much of what I do these days ends up being ultimately a pointless exercise. I build courses and create huge levels of student satisfaction for a school in a university that doesn't seem to care about me. I write protocols which are excellent and then somebody else takes the credit for them. I write A journal publications that get published in the year after I get sacked.

I become really good at falling out of a plane in a way that nobody really understands or cares about.

But I think that really suits me. Because I am taken with doing pointless exercises.

And then it's over. So the journey is all there is, as well as what you leave behind.

Where medals are a minor achievement

I won a couple of silver medals last weekend. Novice two way with the marvellous Leah and four way with Danny, Zac and Thomas.

It was very nice to get the DZ Chief Instructor recognition of teamwork / mentor. Very nice, especially from him. But the verbal recognition is only half of it.

I heard it first from Japanese teachings that the good things that other people say about you are a hundred times more valuable than your own statements. Aussies sometimes say that "self praise is no recommendation".

I've always thought​ that when a person calls themself a leader or a mentor they are often a million miles away​ from it. It's for other people to make that judgement.

Or the facts.

And I take pride in the fact that I took 7 people to a camp last week. We learnt some stuff about bodyflying and 4way, and close to swept the state pool in flatfly. In no way am I conceited - I got two second place, and my first ever AFF student doubled my score in two way.

I will never leave the sky, and I will always be "just good enough" but I have loved this week. And the icing on the cake come from the way that two of the women from the camp freebuilt the base on an eight way state women's record effort.