Reality Laughs

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.

I have an actual, written five year plan. Who do I want to be? (Hint: I am already that man. I am systematically removing from my life everything inconsistent with who that man is.) That’s new.

I am tracking certain metrics monthly. Am I making progress? That’s new.

I am working towards my long-term goals daily. This is not so well focused but it’s happening through a simple method: my self-assigned exercise, no matter what; my self-assigned three hours daily on business, no matter what. That’s my daily plan. Other things fall in around it.

All of this is imperfectly done. Yesterday me was not a planner, a tracker, an aimed arrow. Yesterday me was vague, a whirring bundle of action ridden by a jockey with mood swings.

Today me? I am doing. Directionally correct and learning how to plan and how to execute as I go.

Discipline. And what is upstream of discipline? Truth. Or as Emmet Fox called it, “Your Heart’s Desire.” That thing inside that you secretly dream but seems so inconceivable that you can only turn away with sadness, and distract yourself with pointless, destructive actions. Because thinking of your heart’s desire makes you sad.

Seek that truth. Embrace it. Bring it into the light. Write down your heart’s desire, visible, so your eyes can see it on the page. Immediately do something, anything. Anything that moves you even one millimeter toward your dream.

Move your body and your mind will follow.

Don’t compete to win on short-term things that don’t take me where I want to go.

Pay attention to where I’m going.

From the Jocko podcast 260. The idea is if you you’re injured, have a default protocol on what to do next. “If my knee hurts” doesn’t stop you. Do something else. Pull-ups. Whatever.

Default to always doing.

I run 4 miles a day, every day. At the moment I do this at night when I come home. It’s working, so no changes will be made until this schedule breaks.

The list of gear needed to run is modest: shoes, shorts, shirts, socks. Hat is nice but optional. I am under-stocked on shorts and hats seem to disappear in our household.

Today is the day that I permanently solve that problem.

The Path of Least Resistance. Admonishment to self: “Remove all friction you perceive between you and your heart’s desire.”

In this case I can remove friction by spending a modest amount of money to buy some shorts and hats.

Today is the day.

Memo to self: Solve nagging irritation decisively and permanently with violent immediate action.

Don’t worry about overkill. Overkill is rare, usually easily corrected.

Fear of overkill is usually an excuse for inaction. “Oh, I can’t do that. Something bad might happen!” No it won’t. If anything, fear underkill.

New experiment.

Up to now the M.O. has been intermittent fasting with a time box for eating between noon and 8 pm.

I have stated almost entirely inside the lines. The times outside the lines have been travel, or scheduled events with friends and family where I don’t want to be some sanctimonious fucking asshole and refuse to eat just because. In those situations, eat modestly and STFU. There is no reason to parade your virtue in front of others. There is no benefit to you or them.

The number of discipline lapses? Probably two or three over several months.

The intermittent fasting choice built discipline and helped me understand the value of hard boundaries and when to stop being a hardass.

My best hours for work, productivity, ideas? Morning. These are the last few hours of the fasting cycle, and I would power through those hours with coffee and water. By noon I would be noticeably drained, mental acuity dropping.

So I’m starting today with a new experiment. I will keep the hard end for consuming calories at 8 pm. But I will add in a normal breakfast. It’s no longer intermittent fasting. It’s just life.

The breakfast will be oatmeal with a dollop of peanut butter. Oaymeal because fiber, and I need that. Peanut butter because it makes everything taste better and in theory it has some dense, valuable nutrients.

Oatmeal is defined as one cup of dry oatmeal, cooked.

Dollop of peanut butter is not currently defined. Today it was a heaped soup spoon scooped out of the bottle. I need to figure out how to get a consistent quantity so I can watch the results.

Interesting observation: I finished off the bowl and was ravenously hungry. Eating triggered a desire to eat to satiation.

Instead I went and washed all of the dishes to let the food start to digest. The impulse to eat more went away. I have a French Press full of coffee waiting for me as I start the day.

That’s a lesson. In order to reduce calorie intake, eat an appropriate amount of food and then get away from the table for a while.

This whole thing of running 4 miles at night makes me get up a bit slower than before. Seneca: read a couple of Letters. Coffee while reading. Shower, then foam roller for my quads and calves.

Off to work.

I think this is the beginning of a good system. The next part of the system is the food part. The 16/8 intermittent fasting thing may not be what I need to do.

It’s time for some intelligent experimentation.