Natural Born Heroes

A selection of quotes from Natural Born Heroes:  How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance by Christopher McDougall.

Empathy, the Greeks believed, was the source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.

 

Heroism isn’t some mysterious inner virtue, the Greeks believed; it’s a collection of skills that every man and woman can muster so that in a pinch , they can become a Protector.

 

You are fit if you can adapt to the demands of your environment with ease and imagination.

The primary story is about resistance fighters on Crete battling the Germans during World War II, but McDougall weaves in the stories about Greek mythology, parkour, paleo diets, British historians, and his own experience visiting Crete.

The main story is really interesting, but overall the book is kind of a mess because it jumps around so much.  And as you can glean from the subtitle, the stories seem a bit exaggerated.

Map of California State Parks

We live a couple miles from a state park with two lakes. We visit the park a couple days each month and there are a number of other state parks nearby, so it made sense to buy an annual pass (California Poppy Pass).

The pass came with a list of all the state parks that are included¹ but a random list of parks isn’t very useful, so I added each park to a Google Map (I’m also slightly obsessed with maps, but that’s a different story):

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1.  popular state parks, like the beaches in southern California, are excluded from the pass. I didn’t include those state parks on this map. ↩