Month: February 2021

Discipline is a choice, made again and again and again. I will never get to a point of “Now I have discipline” in the way that I can say “I have shoes”.

Discipline exists only in action. If there is no action there is no discipline.

Actions follow choices. Decisions. Do I run or not? Do I drink a Diet Coke or water? Do I say a kind, supportive word or does my ego run rampant and I say something to bolster my ego?

Choices come from clear intentions, based on strongly-held principles. Principles are usually general, vague. That’s the whole point of principles: they are not precise instructions like “turn left at the next corner after bringing your speed down to 12 mph”.

So how do you make clear choices from generalized principles? Be tough, for instance. What does that mean?

Applied to the question of “run or not” after a filling meal with my family, it means “run”. There isn’t a debate. A tough man treasures the time with his family. A tough man runs, hungry or fed.

Does a tough man choose Diet Coke or water? There is no debate necessary. A tough man always chooses better. Grab a bottle of water, not a can of Diet Coke.

Those little pivoting questions, decisions, choices create discipline. There are hundreds of them, every day. Saying I am disciplined is like saying my boat moving through the water has a wake.

Do you want your boat to have a wake? Keep the sails filled and keep your hand on the tiller, with your voyage charted. Tack if you must in order to reach your goal. Watch the sails. Nudge the rudder this way and that to stay on course. Adjust to the wind and the waves. But go.

Is this what I want to be? This? Is this all I’ve got—is this everything I can give? Is this going to be my life? Do I accept that? Ask yourself those questions, those hard questions and then answer them, truthfully.

Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom

As soon as I realized, dimly, that infinity existed, the game was over.

Infinity in my life, I mean. Experiences that were possible. Achievements. Emotions. Awakenings.

No, I don’t mean real infinity. That’s a mathematical abstraction to me. I mean practical infinity: infinity in the sense that it is impossible for me to ever conceive of the possibility of reaching a spiritual, intellectual, human limit. My life is truly a horizon.

Now that I know this to be true, how can I stop?

I am not the man I am right now. I am so much more than that. There is no limit to more.

Yes, there is a limit to more in some physical realms. That’s not what I’m talking about. For instance, I had two days back to back of 10K runs. My leg muscles feel a little worse than normal. That doesn’t mean I reached a physical limit.

What I have reached is a vision that somewhere on a distant horizon there is a physical point where my brain will rebel. Maybe that’s today. It will tell me to walk, not run.

And I will run anyways.

There is so much more on the far side of running through that moment when the brain says “take it easy” in any one of a dozen seductive ways.

Once you have opened the door, just a sliver, and seen the sunlight outside, you cannot fail to yearn for freedom. You may slam the door shut again, immediately. But you know you opened the door yourself, before. You know you can open it yourself, again.

To live as a man means you must open your own door and walk through it into the sunlight. The first step, into the light, is the hardest.

And once you are bathed in sunlight, the horizon will beckon. Run towards freedom with everything you have. Always.

There is no starting line

It starts when you decide to start.

There is no finish line

It ends when you say it’s accomplished.

Time doesn’t matter

There is no game clock, no time out, no half-time. It’s always on, as long as you are breathing and don’t quit.

There is no award ceremony

You have won when you say so.

There is no end

Every hard-earned achievement will reveal new worlds to explore.

There are no instructions

No one tells you what to do. You are headed for the horizon. Go!

You have no competitors

Those people you see running beside you are running their own race, to their own horizon.

There is no rule book

You decide what is right and wrong.

A Gary Vaynerchuk phrase from a speech.

Says it all, doesn’t it?

Strategic optimism, too. Optimism as a strategy in life.

This is in a speech about hard work as a foundational requirement for success.

Optimism generally, though. It’s an attitude that keeps you here, now. It keeps you in action, doing, experiencing. There is no falling back into romanticizing the past, or wistfully dreaming of an impossible (in your own mind) future. No.

Optimism means you pull a weed or plant a tree today because gardens are good. You don’t kick yourself in the ass for yesterday’s garden or get pissed off because this tree won’t throw decent shade for 25 years. You’re happy, planting the tree.

When the kids were tiny they (heh, it was M, really) gave me a sapling jacaranda tree for Father’s Day. We planted it in the backyard of the old house.

Now I can see the jacaranda from the street when I look at the old house. It makes my eyes well up with a strange happiness. It’s a reminder of optimism, of growing, of love, of the past of course. But look what that moment produced: a beautiful tree that strangers now enjoy and will enjoy for decades, maybe even after I am dead.

Let’s go plant some trees. Real and metaphorical.

Now I’m starting to understand a little bit about Meditations. I think Marcus Aurelius kept writing about the same things again and again to sort out the noise in his head.

That’s what I am doing here.

I never go back and read my old stuff. Maybe that will happen someday, but it isn’t happening now.

Quantic’s Life in the Rain tells the story of my life:

“Sometimes I wonder if I know where I’m going

I go for a walk like this

And it seems I’ve been walking for years and years and years

And I don’t know where I’m going

I hear the Sound leading me on

And I don’t know where it is taking me.”

What is this Sound that has led me to this point? Where is it taking me? Why do I pursue it?

The odometer of life is about to roll over to a momentous birthday.

Rather than listen to the conventional advice, my mind is yelling at me. Run! Build! Do! Make things happen!

This started with physical fitness. Given my age, my prior history, and my genetics, what can I accomplish?

Well, that depends on how I exercise and what I eat.

Upstream of what I do and what I eat (the actions) we find a choice. A choice to run, to lift, to eat in a way consistent with my goals.

And bolted to that choice is discipline. Having made that choice, do I stick by it? Do I execute?

In other words, the only variable in this equation is discipline.

Discipline is the crux of this climb.

It’s like that time on Middle Cathedral in the ‘70s when My climbing partner and I watched our water, food, and jackets plummet to the ground from six pitches up.

What to do? Give up and rappel down? No. Fuck it. Climb. Sleep cold on a ledge. Wake up and climb again. Finish the route.

I led most of the pitches the second day. Dehydrated on a hot spring day, maybe I would get 30 or 40 feet and have to stop, desperately tired. Route-finding skills? Nonexistent.

But we made it and came off the route with more hardware than we had started with, picking up abandoned nuts and carabiners from other climbers. We would even go off-route to get them.

Hiking off the backside I came across a fetid puddle, green slime and insects in the warm water. I drank deeply. On the Valley floor we hitchhiked back to camp. I, at least, felt triumphant. My climbing partner, I don’t know how he felt.

I know discipline. I can do the hard stuff.

It’s abundantly clear to me now that the running is all about discipline. I don’t run to run. I run to have an hour of constant self-discipline.

How I muster that self-discipline varies. It might be self-talk. That’s particularly satisfying. Reminding myself that I am, deep within, a beast. That’s motivating. And it is sustainable because it comes from within.) It might be inspiration from a podcast. It might be the cadence of music I’m listening to.

The goal I have selected has no finish line. It has no time limit. The goal is the horizon and my time limit is death. There is no rest, no respite, no recovery day.

I know I wrote about this before and I will write about it again as I work out my thoughts.

To choose a path that has no end, that promises only hardship, and asks you to make the harder choice every time . . . that feels like the right path to me.

The universe is in balance. Let’s put in the work and see what’s on the other side of the hard choices. Seeds of discipline. Expect nothing in return except the satisfaction of action. Go.

My mind is the limit. It’s time to remove the limits.

Yesterday I decided to run 10K instead of the usual 6K – 8K that I do each day. I went to my usual pleasant and popular 5K course at a local public park. As usual, there were a couple hundred walkers and runners out there.

I didn’t feel any worse off after 10K and in fact contemplated doing more distance. My split times were better than my evening runs around the neighborhood. I’m not fast by any stretch of the imagination but when you are 45 seconds per mile faster at a longer distance . . . what gives?

No injuries. I’m going to stabilize at 10K for now until it is my default distance. Then, either push the distance or start pushing for speed. (Speed in a relative sense. I’m never going to be truly speedy. Let’s say a 60 minute 10K. Yesterday was 72 minutes.) I’m doing enough cardio (I think) for health purposes. Fifty to sixty minutes of running and elevated heartbeat should be good, right?

Health is why I’m here. But in addition I want to test my willingness to persevere, to run even after my body says it’s done for the day.

We think of mind control as an external thing. People try to control us. Propaganda. Advertising.

Really, mind control is an inside thing. We control our own minds. And we reap the rewards.

Or we don’t control our own minds, and reap those rewards.

What is the difference between the person who thinks that someone outside will make him happy and the one who decides that it’s up to him to make his own life? It’s the difference between a ship with no crew, drifting with wind and tide, and a ship with a captain carefully guiding vessel and crew toward a faraway harbor. Waves, wind, and currents affect them both, but one will arrive safe in port, while the other will eventually founder on a rocky shore.

If you want the government to make conditions so you will be happy, you are a lost soul. Because sooner or later a government action (that you think is a pre-requisite for your happiness) requires a person inside government who controls his own mind and steers his own course.

Without that first actor, government is just an infinite regress of people all waiting for a prior condition external to them before taking action. Causation must start with a self-directed person.

And if you are relying on government to make your life good you had better hope that the self-directed person is a Cincinnatus and not a Nero. A Churchill, not a Stalin. Let’s leave it at that — long-ago examples where your prejudices about current politicians won’t blind you.

It’s not just government. The same holds true for your school, or your job, or your church, or your family, or your friends.

So what are you going to do? Wait for someone else, who is a stranger to you, who doesn’t know you and does not care about you to do something to make you happy? Or take responsibility for yourself?

Everything is finally good now that Trump is President? Or everything is good because Biden replaced Trump and now things will be good and you will be happy?

This kind of thinking marks you as a piece of broken styrofoam floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Take control of your own thoughts. It’s the only thing under your control anyways. And then watch what happens to your life.

Of course there are people who want to exercise mind control over you. Political propaganda. Economic propaganda we call advertising. Subtle behavioral cues to drive us this way and that.

Be aware, call it out, and reject them.

But it’s not enough to reject overt attempts at control. It is necessary to fill the mind with truth, virtue, principles. If you fill your mind with truth, you make a mental umbrella so that the shower of lies cannot affect you.

Here is what my day looks like today.

Read. This morning it was Meditations, book 2.

Write. I did that just now.

And then go to work, keeping my actions in line with truth and honor. Knowing that all of the externals seeking to push me this way and that will decay and fade away. All of them.

Run at lunchtime. Because a long run is magic.

Then in the evening celebrate another good day with my family. Because today is, indeed, a day of celebration.

The distance is going up: 5.36 miles last night. Don’t believe the false precision of the Apple Watch, however.

Last night was a triumph. I was tired and wanted an off day. I ran anyway.

Choice and discipline.

Bob said that.

My morning routine is to feed the dog, make coffee, and read. At the moment the reading will be one of the Stoics.

Then, write something here. Something that future me needs to hear. An exhortation. A reminder. Because when I’m in the shit I need to remember those things. I need that encouragement.

My morning routine needs to adapt. The others in the household are waking up earlier. My quiet time is not so quiet.

There is only one solution: get up earlier.