Welcome to Day 24 of the July Intensity Project!
31 Days Toward Living with More Intensity & Creativity
As we move toward our last week in this series, I want to begin to share some examples of what it looks like to live with intensity and creativity. In a comment to a previous post about psychomotor readiness, Barb wrote about her brother, Tom Haig:
“For anyone who is interested in psychomotor intensity, please look at my brother’s blog. A former Wisconsin high school champion diver, he’s lived in more than 50 countries as a professional high diver. He became a paraplegic 14 years ago, but that has not stopped his intensity. He races, skis and continues to travel – just spent 6 months in India volunteering at a radio station being developed by the Tibetan Government in Exile.”
Intrigued, I found this video that explains more about Tom and the accident that changed how he moves through life but not his intensity for living:
Tom Haig’s blog, Captain Crip, is a well-written and humorous collection of posts about, well, whatever he is thinking about or wherever he happens to be. For example, he dedicates a photo essay to “the Monks of McLeod Ganj and their ever-increasing sense of footwear fashion”:
“When I first came to India in 1991 everybody in the entire country wore flat leather sandals with little or no support – the kind of footwear you would imagine Jesus wearing. I bought a pair in Delhi so I would have something to wear when I stepped into the Hare Krishna Guest House bathroom in the middle of the night. But these torture chambers were so awful, even for the few minutes a day I sported them, that I left them at the bathroom door when I checked out.”
Or consider this description of a marathon in Washington, D. C.:
“Then the race, the whole event, turned surreal. When I first looked at the course a decade earlier I dreamed what it would be like racing up and down the mall with crowds screaming as I passed by our country’s greatest monuments. But the reality was so much cooler. As is common in wheelchair events, we’re on the course much earlier than the runners. The bands are usually just plugging in and tuning up as we pass them. When it came to racing down Constitution Avenue not only was the street closed and wiped of the daily grind of the city, the air was completely silent. I was flying as fast as I could down one of the most famous streets on the planet and the only sound I could hear was the wind I created.”
Do you know someone who is an inspiring profile of intensity and creativity?
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Lisa – thanks so much for sharing this! Tom is about to head back to Portland, Oregon and is looking for a job in news or sportswriting, but it’s been great to have him in Milwaukee for a few weeks.
He’s self-published an amazing book of his writing about earlier adventures, including participating in the Acapulco cliff diving championships, traveling around the world diving off a 70-foot tower on fire, and how he ended up in a wheelchair. I’d love to shop it around to agents but am unclear how to do so. Please let me know if you have any thoughts!
Barb, I actually do have some thoughts on agents (and one in particular that might be a good fit!). I’ll email you later today.