Sunday's Beach is Full of Hope!!

So I have taken to walking on the beach in the early mornings. I started off listening to music using blackgilado's shuffle, bit soon tired of the constant stress of having to find interesting music to copy to the 512M available on this "ancient" device. So I decided to finally utilize the audible.com membership we have been paying for and ignoring (along with the gym memberships, pool memberships, newspapers etc - we are big joiners, but a bit hopeless on the followthrough). I started off listening to Sherlock Holmes (Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson and Orson Welles) it was pretty good, but I know most of these stories so well that they have lost some of their charm. So I moved on. I decided I need some help in getting past my own 80% and dove directly into "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" narrated by Stephen R. Covey (the author) himself. And Wow am I lacking!!

Yesterday (Sunday) I got to the beach pretty early (before 6am). I was amazed and horrified. The amount of shit left by the weekend hordes is staggering. I arrived before the pack of "Foreign Workers" employed by the contractor to the Herzliya municipality (so they can pay well below minimum wage and avoid the city workers union) had started their clean-up. I had forgotten that in the old days I would never run on the beach on Sundays because its just too depressing. As I gingerly picked my way through the broken bottles, leaky diapers, disabled beach chairs and enough plastic to fill the Machtesh HaGadol (looking out from Mitzpeh Rimon), Stephen Covey droned on about how change comes from inside out. At one point he quoted Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do, excellence therefore is not an event but a habit".

I shouldn't complain, they closed Tel Aviv beaches last weekend because of dangerous levels of sewerage in the water. I suppose one can find excellence anywhere, even in the way your destroy your environment, defile nature, poo on your beaches and pee in the sea. We rule!!!