[NFB-Seniors] {Spam?} Hobbies - Let us chare how a blind person can engage in all kinds of hobbies

[Robert Leslie Newman]

Hi You All

RE: Do you have a hobby and want to tell us about it? Or, you gave a hobby
up and wonder if anyone else has figured out how to do it? 

(Hoe we do not get a SPAM warning with this message version!) 

 

Here is one of the best uses of this listserv! 

We have 305 email addresses/people on this list. Sure, not all of the
seniors that are presently members of the NFB are with us on this list, but
for sure, it is people that are looking to communicate with other seniors. I
think we all are eager for information, and are also willing to give it; to
support each other. 

 

Note: The NFB Seniors Division's 2020 Virtual Senior Retreat is coming up
October 18th-24th. I will lead the discussion class, entitled Exploring
Hobbies. We want to offer meaningful and exciting information by means of:
Speakers who are great examples; Written information about resources; Links
to audio and/or video presentations. 

 

Consider the following:

 

#1 Are you willing to share with us about your hobbies, and how you handle
them? The information we gather will be used in our Retreat, be placed on
our NFB Seniors Division's website, and in one way or another, with all of
us on this list. 

 

#2 Here are examples of what we mean as a hobby: Collecting things;
gardening; Crafts; Woodworking; fishing; Cooking/baking; Sowing, knitting,
etc.; Reading/writing; Exercising; Birding; Restoring old cars. You tell us!


 

#3 Here is what we need to have said, described: Title of the hobby; Your
name; Contact information: Extent of your blindness; what alternative
methods and special equipment do you use; did you do this before you lost
vision, or is this a new hobby. 

 

Remember, we are trying to help one another, we blind seniors, but also to
enlighten family, blindness services professionals, and the general public.
So Keep yourself focused on making your description, shortish, easy to
follow, and to the point. I can and will help with needed editing;
straightening out with is written, or editing an audio file.

 

#4 Here are methods on how you can share, tell us:

 

#5 You Make a recording and get it to me. Or, we together get on the phone
and I record your description. We'd have to make an appointment, to make
sure we hook up at a mutually agreed upon convenient time. 402-660-1743

 

*2. Write an email or document with a description and send it to me at-
robertleslienewman at gmail.com <mailto:robertleslienewman at gmail.com>  

 

**One of my hobbies is exercise, swimming in the summer in our back yard
pool makes that easy; when the temp is right. Below is an article that
appear  several years back in the Braille Monitor; I'm still doing this same
daily routine.

 

Braille Monitor                                                    June 2008


Swimming in the Zone
A Mile in My Backyard

by Robert Leslie Newman

>From the Editor: Summer is here, and many blind people would be interested
in getting exercise in the pool if they had access and know-how. Two
articles in this issue should offer encouragement to those who love the
water. The first is by Robert Leslie Newman, who is one of our most
dedicated advocates for exercise. This is what he says:

Swimming has always been one of my favorite physical activities. As a kid I
saw it as fun and physically refreshing on a hot day and a time to be with
my friends. Now that I am older, less than a year away from completing my
sixth decade, though I still love swimming for those early reasons, I
realize that swimming fulfills an additional set of personal needs. In this
article I intend to explore how a blind person swims independently and how
this exercise benefits me physically and mentally and boosts my
self-confidence. Finally, I will describe how this exercise can get you into
the zone.

I am lucky to be at a stage of life and career in which my wife and I have
been able to make one of our dreams come true: to have our own backyard
swimming pool. It is an aboveground oval pool measuring twelve feet by
twenty-four feet and is four feet deep. Its sides are steel, its thick
plastic liner is aqua blue, and it has an electric pump and filtering
system. We had a deck built that wraps around both ends and one long side
and joins an existing deck--house to pool without getting your feet dirty.

Swimming as a totally blind person demands the same basic travel skills as
traveling on dry land: a combination of hearing, touch, and common sense. As
I describe my personal technique, note that, just as not all blind travelers
use basic travel skills in the same way, each blind swimmer finds his or her
own style of making it work. When swimming on the surface, my preference is
always to have my ears out of the water so I can use my hearing to keep
oriented; this would also help to avoid collisions with other swimmers. In
this ears-up style I am able, not only to keep track of where I am relative
to the length and width of the pool, but more important, to detect where the
side walls are, helping me avoid running into them and, when swimming laps,
to know precisely where they are in order to stay within touching distance
of them.

This hearing the walls, detecting where they are, is more than just
listening for the sound of splashing water as it encounters the pool's sides
and hearing background sounds coming over the top of the wall. This ability
is more a result of the very real phenomenon that many blind people speak of
as "blind sonar" or echolocation (before it was better understood, it was
called "facial vision"). When I am asked to explain this "detecting the
walls," I usually explain that objects make their presence known both by the
quality of their echo feedback, which can be either highly reflective or
sound absorbing, and also by the pressure that their mass projects, which we
usually feel on the face. Once you detect it, you can use the amount of
pressure to judge your distance and angle from the object--in this case the
pool wall. (Sailors speak of sailing on a moonless and starless night and
feeling the loom of a nearby towering rock or an on-coming island.) 

Swimming as exercise is one of my new enthusiasms. I love physical exercise.
At every stage of my life I have found time for it. I presently do some sort
of exercise six days a week: lifting weights, running, and muscle crunches.
Now I mix in swimming during the warm months. Not only does swimming tax
your respiratory and circulatory systems, it also involves all your muscles
and is a low-impact activity. I love the feeling I have after a good workout
in the water, overall fatigue yet a sense of accomplishment for having given
my body a good workout. Knowing I am better inside and out gives me a glow
of virtue. Like most people I pride myself on knowing that I am taking good
care of my body, my health, and my general appearance.

If I don't watch it, I can get bored when I swim. So, as part of pool
maintenance, I make a game of finding leaves and other debris that have
fallen in the water. This is not just walking around feeling for stuff with
my toes, I'm on a hunt. I make it a test of how quickly I can get to the
bottom and conduct a search over a reasonably large area. I really get to
work on my ability to hold a breath. 

I have also made up several great underwater games. I drop and lie prone on
the floor of the pool. As I sink, I expel all the air in my lungs,
eliminating buoyancy. The object is to sink and not have to fight to stay on
the bottom. With some of my body touching the spongy plastic flooring and
stretched out with arms extended, I propel myself by finger and toe
movements only. The object is to see how far and fast I can go. 

Another favorite underwater game is to visualize myself as a bird in flight;
the medium in which I am propelling myself, a body of water, is not very
different from a bird flying through the air. The real thrill that comes
with this second exercise is planning and executing course changes,
sometimes radical ones; this is as close to soaring as we humans can get. If
I am swimming in a straight line, I perform a tilting sharp right or left
turn or do a figure eight. The resulting position of my body is much like a
bird's motion during a banking turn. You can really surprise yourself by
coming up from the bottom on a steep angle as fast as you can and pop out of
the water. This is called broaching when a whale does it. 

My favorite swimming exercise is distance swimming, and I love to watch
people's reaction when I say, "I swam a mile in my backyard." This is of
course an aerobic activity intended to work on the respiratory, circulatory,
and musculature systems. The equation calculating a mile of swimming goes
like this--a mile, 5,280 feet, divided by the perimeter of my pool, 56.5
feet, equals about ninety-three laps. Because I am swimming just inside the
pool's wall, using good old blind sonar to keep within touching distance of
the side at all times, I add five laps to bring the distance traveled of
about fifty-four feet a lap up to 5,292 feet. On average I make one circuit
every thirty-five seconds, so one mile takes about fifty-seven minutes to
complete.

I have been asked how I track when I have completed a full circuit of the
pool. I first thought that I would just keep track of the two turns and the
two straight-a ways and raise my count that way. But, when you get into
long-distance swimming and hit the zone that I will speak of in the next
paragraphs, your mind begins floating free. You focus on thoughts that do
not lend themselves to counting turns and straight-a ways or the shifting of
the sun or the sound of the neighbor's lawnmower. So I increase my lap count
by one each time I come abreast of the sound of the skimmer box, a cut-out
hole in the pool's wall at the waterline that serves as an overflow port and
allows floating debris to be skimmed off the surface.

Swimming a mile is not something I do every day; I don't always have the
time to devote to it. Yet on average in the summer I do it two to three
times a week. I am going to describe swimming a mile because of what
happens, not only the physical glow and healthy fatigue, but, even more
intriguing, achieving the zone, the mental state that comes as my body
adjusts to the strong and continuous physical strain.

Starting a long swim, I am excited to begin but nervous that I may not make
it. I plunge in, either pushing off the ladder or diving off the deck, not
touching bottom then or when I finish. Until I hoist myself out again onto
the hard, dry planks of the deck, water will be my only medium. My swims
have pretty much developed a pattern of both physical and mental stages: the
warm-up, the struggle, the second wind and the zone, then the hard work, and
the final push to the finish. 

I warm up during the first ten or so laps, stretching muscles and joints,
working the breathing, finding the right stroke, slowly building up speed. A
modified breast stroke works best for me. Visualize my head up, ears and
nose out of the water, my back and shoulders rhythmically bobbing above and
below the surface of the water, my body rocking as I first stretch out, legs
kicking back while simultaneously my arms reach ahead. Then my body
contracts as my arms stroke back and my legs come forward. This quick
one-two action is repeated again and again. I call this swimming style my
sea gallop.

I first feel fatigue somewhere in the twenties. I just push through this
feeling and refuse to give in. Sometimes, to boost my willpower, I give
myself a fantasy goal, visualizing that I am swimming away from the mainland
toward an island a mile offshore. 

Somewhere in the thirties I reach and pass through a physical barrier and
settle into my most economical stroke. I have my second wind and find that
pushing my speed up to about two-thirds of my best is a pace that I can hold
for the next twenty to thirty laps. It is here that I am no longer giving
full attention to what my body is doing. I experience a separation of
physical and mental awareness. I have reached the zone. My body is working
on something like autopilot, where I am fully aware of all that it is doing
and I am in full control, but I suddenly find my thoughts expanding,
sometimes cascading. When I focus on one thought, the images come fast and
full, and I find that I can take them places that I ordinarily would not be
capable of--working out problems in relationships, building story-lines for
articles such as this one, examining the secrets of life, and more. During
this period I have the hardest time keeping track of laps. When in doubt of
the count, I always repeat the lap. 

The later fifties and early sixties can be a time to slow down and shift the
strain from one set of muscles to another, giving parts of my body a rest.
Then in the later sixties and lower seventies I can again push on strong, up
to about two-thirds power, and I'm again in the zone. By the later
mid-eighties and nineties I am again swimming at about one-third speed,
working at it to stay steady and concentrating on having a good finish.

At this writing my longest distance has been two miles. My goal for this
summer is five miles. I have run five miles many times in the past, and
swimming them will indeed be a challenge. (The zone in running is called
"runner's high.") But challenge in life is what we all need, and as blind
people in this day and age, when others often doubt our abilities, we need
to be ready to tackle any and all challenges that come our way. Success with
a physical challenge can be one way of building belief and confidence in
ourselves and can help us to meet and overcome life's challenges.

 

 

 

 

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