I wanted to take gymnastics when I was a kid. There are exactly zero options to do that when you live in a town of a few hundred people in the mountains, so my parents sent me to stay with some family friends in Albuquerque for a couple of weeks so I could try it.
I also took swim lessons, which I hated more than anything I'd ever done. I still don't like to swim. I do it well enough to save myself if there's ever a catastrophe, but that's about it. I am about as far from water as possible here in West Texas, so I don't think it's a problem I need to address anytime soon.
I remember enjoying gymnastics, but my mom said I was super disappointed when I came back because I did not get to meet the guy who invented them, Jim Nastic. I can understand why I was sad. He's probably pretty cool.
I don't remember anything I learned in gymnastics, and I don't know very much about the sport. I have, however, gotten good at identifying mental gymnastics in my own and other people's thinking. It's an important skill because mental gymnastics are probably the number one way we deceive ourselves, and it's now so common that we not only expect it from other people, we help them do it.
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