Reality Laughs

So in each case you need to say: “This is due to God.” Or: “This is due to the interweavings and intertwinings of fate, to coincidence or chance.” Or: “This is due to a human being. Someone of the same race, the same birth, the same society, but who doesn’t know what nature requires of him. But I do. And so I’ll treat them as the law that binds us—the law of nature—requires. With kindness and with justice. And in inconsequential things? I’ll do my best to treat them as they deserve.

Meditations, 3:11.

That’s how Marcus Aurelius responds: know what the law of nature, the logos, demands, and treat people wound me with kindness and justice.

And ignore the bullshit.

Important: personal knowledge, principles, integrity. Not your own, but eternal. Natural. Externally true, not internally constructed. My idea of right is not what matters. The laws of nature are what matter.

You can only operate from that base.

How do I distinguish between my own deep brilliance 🙂 and timeless principles? Take Nassim Taleb’s idea of time as a filter. If an idea has survived a long time, it’s probably a law of nature. Otherwise it would have been disproved a long time ago, and discarded.

This will be a topic that I ruminate on for a while. I need to work it out in my head.

It’s the question of choice. And it is the question of choice in the face of facts. What do I expect of myself?

It is the nature/nurture question. Am I going to accept who I am, what I am, and my circumstances as limiting my options? Or will I make choices and take action, notwithstanding?

I understand the place of realistic limits. Those limits are time and resources available to me.

I understand the limits of fate. Fortune will smile on me, or she will not.

But within those limits, what’s my excuse? I’m too old and have seen to much to blame my genes or my childhood, or to whine about boneheaded politicians who fuck things up for everyone including me.

All of that? It’s weather.

And regardless of the weather, what am I going to do today? Am I on the beam? Am I deliberately choosing the right path, regardless of difficulty?

We all love the Horatio Alger stories. Harry Potter is of that ilk: plucky, determined kid chooses and struggles to rise above adversity.

Where is the struggle for me? Why do I not accept this concept wholeheartedly? There is some gear in me that wants to give up and relax — when it is a question of my own choices. There is another gear in me that wants to give someone else a hall pass in life — when circumstances and fate dealt him or her a bad hand.

The first one is simple. Refuse to be a victim.

The second is subtle. I think there is a back door attack here by my brain. If I give them a hall pass, I get one, too. So refuse to do that. Marcus Aurelius and all that stuff: the killer is the opinion I have of things I cannot control. So refuse to have opinions about those things.

Compassion and helping hand, of course. And I’m a retail assistance kind of guy, not wholesale. “Save the whales” (or insert your favorite “I’m going to save those people over there” mentality) is not for me. I like one-on-one.

Marcus Aurelius talks about dealing with people with justice and a genuine desire to help. That’s the way to go.

I read a few older entries here. Ouch.

Why am I so self-critical?

There is no plateau. Either keep the pressure on or allow weakness to enter. These are the choices.

Metaphor: airplane. Keep the enjoined running or glide. Glide sounds fun until you realize that glide means go down. Maybe the plane loses altitude slowly, or maybe it glides like a rock. If you want to get somewhere, though, power on and careful navigation.

The metaphor is misleading, though. It’s not a matter of adding energy on the one hand and a void of energy on the other. In life, it’s a tide. Either you are consistently adding energy to your life or sloth and decay seeps in.

Maybe the better metaphor is a leaky boat: if you aren’t pumping all the time the leaks will sink you.

Whatever. There is no point to going to extremes with metaphors, or to seeking analogies in physics and the idea of entropy. Figures of speech illustrate. They don’t prove.

Either I run every day or weakness (of mind) seeps in and starts to poison my resolve. Weakness seeps into my muscles, too. But it’s 99% the mental weakness that I care about.

Same thing in life. I’m up at 5:30 am now because the household has started to join me at being awake at 6:30 am so if I want time to read and write, I need to get up early.

How do I train my mind to resist weakness and the subtle (but plausible! and persuasive!) self-talk that tells me to not do?

First. Recognize it. The thoughts that tell me to not do something are the dangerous thoughts. The thoughts to do something are my friends. Yes, be careful to not overdo. That’s my primary flaw at the moment. I need to find the balance so I don’t have a giant traffic jam of things in my life. Throughput. Get that.

Example. Running. The brain says don’t overtrain. Be careful! Listen, brain. I’m so far from overtraining that we are in different time zones. Doing 4 miles instead of 6 is not a prudent guard against overtraining. It’s laziness. It’s weakness entering the body.

Second. Reject weakness when recognized and train yourself. Don’t just resist temptation. Counterbalance it with positive counteraction. The brain concedes a 10k and you pace it off? It says “well if your route leaves you a little ways from home you can just walk back because you did your 10k, after all.” Fuck you, brain. Run it out. All the way.

Don’t resist evil with absence of evil. Resist evil with good. Positive barometric pressure in your thoughts will keep weakness at bay.

It’s true in physical conditioning and it’s true with peace of mind. Anderson would say “it’s easy to do but it’s hard to keep doing.” So true, for mindset, for everything.

The Carpenter: “pray without ceasing.” So true. If you look at prayer as a mindset thing (as I do) the path is clear: keep talking to God. By keeping that conversation going, you don’t leave a void in your head for destructive self-talk.

And for me, the easiest way to keep talking to God is to appreciate everything around me. Gratitude.

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.