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Limits

It doesn’t bother you that you weigh only x or y pounds and not three hundred. Why should it bother you that you have only x or y years to live and not more? You accept the limits placed on your body. Accept those placed on your time.

Meditations x:49

I accept the limits on my ability to run fast or far, on my strength, on my eyesight and hearing. I know I must work within those limits, and do so without complaint.

But time.

Marcus Aurelius talks about mortality and lifetime (a lot!). I am not eager to look at that. I pay intellectual lip service to the idea, but it is not a truth to me in the same way that physical constraints are a reality, a truth. This is necessary for me to acknowledge. This too shall come to pass: I will accept the truth and the mortality. (Maybe M.A. revisited the idea so often because he struggled with it, too).

There is a different way, though, where I am hitting the time wall and finally . . . FINALLY . . . starting to acknowledge reality.

And that is the idea of compounding results over time. It took me until this year, driving to Colorado at dawn, to really truly know that the promises had come true for me after 30 years of work. Sometimes intense, sometimes diffident. But work.

And the realization is spilling over elsewhere. Repeated effort, repeated and constant focus over time. That may be the strongest weapon any of us have. I’m seeing that by way of the Pentathlon. (I will repurpose Lights to use for a DIY Pentathlon when the official one ends today).

I guess with mortality the place I am right now is the idea of being stopped. There is nothing to be done about that. All of us are stopped at some point. In the meantime, sprint for the horizon, and if you can’t sprint, trudge.

The fun is in the little stuff: the realization that repeated efforts suddenly dissolve intractable obstacles. Use 100 minutes of daily MIW to slingshot forward on a potentially life-altering business strategy. Use daily running to suddenly slingshot forward into more distance than you thought imaginable. Use repeated daily hammering on the inbox until one day – in a day – you reduce the number of emails in half.

The old guys were right: “No matter what.” Remember M.F. And how he would drag out the “whaaaaaaaaaat.” It took 30+ years of no matter what to show they were right. I’m going to march to the horizon no matter whatting everything in my life.

Just remember. The mystical experience in the desert before dawn on I-15 that you had? Remember that. The eastern sky and how it looks at 4:00 am, in a new Benz flying past a truck grinding up an incline at twice his speed, he in his universe and me in mine, we in our universe together? My music filling my car. What music is filling his? The music of motion is filling ours.

You can have that daily. Inbox = 191 to inbox = 105 in a day? Mystical. Remember that.