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I heard a documentarian say the oceans were the most unexplored known territory, even more so than space. He said we know less about the deeps than we do the heights, and I suppose we could debate his point. He was no doubt trying to peak our interest and raise more money for more documentaries, more time in a submarine. Who can blame him. We do know a lot about space, and we are learning more about the oceans, but I don’t think either of these territories are the least explored. I still think the least explored territory is humanity, both collective and individual. It’s not physical territory, I know, but where is there more fearful darkness or illuminating beauty than in the depths of the person sitting next to you on a bus? Where is there more evil and more beauty than in the unexplored cosmos of a human being? I wonder if you might take a walk tonight after dinner with your daughter or your son, or your wife or your neighbor, and take the submarines down for a dive. Who are they? What do they love? What are they afraid of? Do they understand their own power? [...]

The following is the first in a series of guest posts. Jason Boyett is the author of O Me of Little Faith and the Pocket Guide series of books. Find him at Dadequate, Twitter, Facebook, and at jasonboyett.com. There’s a hot new website — they still make those, you know — called Fitocracy. It’s a site for tracking your day-to-day fitness achievements. How many push-ups did you do? How fast did you run that 5K? How long were you on the elliptical? You log in your workouts, it assigns points based on your exercises’ degree of difficulty, and you watch the points accumulate. Once you reach a certain number of points, you move up a level. You unlock achievement badges. And because it’s as much a social media site as anything else, your friends and followers get to see how well (or poorly) you’re doing. The guys who started it, Brian Wang and Richard Talens, grew up playing video games. They knew how addictive gaming could be. What if the pleasures of gaming — new levels, new achievements, a flurry of points — could be applied to exercise? After all, exercise isn’t always fun. You don’t always see immediate changes [...]