Reality Laughs

So just do it.

I wrote long term goals at the end of the 2020. And the trend lines look good at the end of February 2021.

Weight: six pounds down in two months. Financial goals are trending in the right direction, though the stock market noise will sometimes hide the progress. Take the long view.

More important than that: I actually have written long term goals.

What is unexamined never changes.

OODA loop starting today: on the business. I’m guilty of magical thinking and winning by brute force.

Let’s watch cash flow cycles and make some changes.

When I give myself a reason to not do something or do something, just be careful. It’s probably a lie to myself.

“It’s ok to stop running 10K every day, because my feet are sore.”

It’s a reason.

Lie. I’m lying to myself.

The conclusion does not follow from the premise.

It’s the old saying in a different disguise, isn’t it? “There are no explanations, only excuses.”

Explanations are explanations. They are obvious: a teacher explains calculus or (my situation right now) the principles of symbolic logic.

“Reasons” are not always so obvious, except they seem to seek the entropy of comfort. Less physical effort, satiating a desire, a psychological pat on the back, administered by self, for why it’s ok that my efforts failed. Those are reasons conjured up within my own head. Don’t get me started on the reasons I give myself for failure (or never trying at all) that are outside my control.

No reasons. No lies.

Don’t downplay yourself here. Since you started running seriously you have stuck to it: blisters, bloody toenails from bad shoes, full belly from dinner with the family, “it’s late”, fatigue, boredom, cold, bloody knees from crashing in the dark on a rough sidewalk. None of these “reasons” stopped you.

That’s good stuff. Keep it up.

Evil: the same old thing.

No matter what happens, keep this in mind: It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all. Familiar, transient.

Meditations 6:1

Reading that spawned the melody of Vampires in my head. Ironic that the song was written by a pair of musicians who live in the epicenter of Vampire Country. They probably are not aware of the bigger picture: they have distinct and pronounced left-leaning political views and appear not to understand that their favorites, too, are vampires and not saints.

And that spawned the familiar angry frustration about all things political — local, state, and Federal. They’re all vampires, regardless of party label. They’re vampires, from lowly noob bureaucrat to Secretary of the Whatever.

I need respite from that thinking. It’s filled with lies and self-righteousness. Those thoughts harm me. Even if I am correct.

Is the newly-elected City Councilwoman a vampire? Unlikely. Our Congressional representative? Perhaps. Our Senators? They have demonstrated vampire-like attributes, with the personal power and personal wealth acquired during government service to prove it.

So it’s comforting to read Marcus Aurelius. Politicians have always been thus. Evil is transient. That’s comforting, too.

Marcus Aurelius didn’t even have a choice: as emperor, he lived at the epicenter of his time’s vampire lair. He knew a thing or two about corrupt, inept, power-hungry Senators.

What is my duty to my community and my country? What to do?

First: extreme ownership, to use the Jocko phrase. Rugged individualism, rigorous character, whatever you want to call it. Be a strong man. Strong in principles, character, and action. A simple, forthright man, to quote my own “about” page.

Be so across the board. No “ends justifies the means” because this an excuse to justify actions after the fact. By selecting a goal, a result, I pre-filter the actions that are to be taken. Actions must always, regardless of noble intent or result, be principled.

And principles are simple, obvious, ancient, and few. Just has evil has always been this, so too has virtue.

Virtue in all actions. I will never eliminate evil. But I can shine sunlight on vampires by living a virtuous life.

I’m mostly writing this for me. I’m deeply conflicted. Consensus public opinion seems to be wrong-direction: passive, submissive, asking for handouts and comfort rather than taking individual responsibility.

On my worst days my attitude is “You are entitled to your own opinions and are entitled to reap the rewards of them, even to your death.” That, I know, is true. Each man pays for his life up front through his thoughts and actions, and later reaps the harvest from the seeds he planted —a good life or sad. Sometimes the reward comes quickly, sometimes slowly. But it always comes.

Yet I know I can’t change the world. Or even one person in it. I have watched family members die because of their choices. It looks like another one, who has tasted freedom, has chosen against it. He will probably be dead, sooner rather than later. He has chosen the bitter harvest.

Powerless.

It’s all I can do to keep myself on the path.

Powerless.

No resolution here. Just confusion.

Yeah, baby.

Whether it’s the audio, the reading, the Pentathlon, or the daily running, I don’t know. All I know — I am different.

15 10K days in a row. I know for a lot of people that’s chump change running. Not in my life. In my life it tastes like victory.

Causation?

How quickly it will all be erased by time. How much has been erased already.

Meditations 6:59

My grandfathers. Known to me in my memory. Their names are just sounds to my children, and their pictures are those of strangers. Erased in my lifetime.

My great-grandfathers. Unknown to me entirely. I don’t even know their names.

Me.

Dropping this here to remind myself:

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.

Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.

Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

Meditations 6:51

This I must remember — places here after a conversation about “this crazy world today”.

Yes “they” are crazy. Their actions reveal it. They will pay the price (in to and including death, either fast or over a lifetime) for their ideas.

No you can’t do anything about it and you yourself will go crazy or have a giant pity party unless you focus entirely on your own thoughts and your own actions.

Bedrock.

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.

Nothing has meaning to my mind except its own actions. Which are within its own control. And it’s only the immediate ones that matter. Its past and future actions too are meaningless.

Meditations x:32

Today I’m struggling. Thinking I should stop running so much. Thinking I’m a failure at work. All flavors of quit present themselves to me for action.

The mind is not so good. I know why: a specific job I need to do. I don’t want to do it but I made the commitment to do it.

Eat your oatmeal. Drink your coffee. Those are the immediate actions.

After that, stride forward to the day. Three cycles of red zone and the rest of the day’s cycles for the task I do not want to do.

Stay in the now. Actions matter, not thoughts (i.e., opinions about what’s going on). Do the work.

My actions will determine my mentality. As the old guys used to say, “You can’t think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking.”

I’m one of the old guys now.