I can now carve off out four miles effortlessly. No hard breathing, just a comfortable, sustainable pace. I don’t watch my speed but let’s say it’s about an 11 minute mile pace. You’re faster, I’m sure. You do you.
Running makes you think. I thought about how to think. What happened to me and how I learned to think? Here’s what I came up with.
Scale. I needed to understand scale, and my relation to the universe. How simultaneously I was so small as to be invisible and immaterial, yet be the center of the universe. Marcus Aurelius talks about this a lot. Well, he talks about scale, but not so much about relativity. He talks about understanding how little space he occupies on this planet or the universe, and how little time a human consumes in relation to infinite time.
This opens the mind to the possibility of humility. Humility is essential to growth. Arrogance, pride — these will bar the door to growth and peace of mind.
Ignorance. Having wrapped your head around how small and insignificant you are, the next thing is to deeply accept how little you know. You can see this by comparison to one of your peers. You can see this in your own life: what you know now compared to what last-year you knew.
More humility.
This opens the mind to the idea that you’re more likely to be wrong than right. Keeping a “probably wrong right now, but willing to learn” attitude is the result.
The importance of knowing the difference between ignorance and error must be understood and accepted. Welcome ignorance, shun error. Admitting your ignorance is the key to growth. persisting in error guarantees you will stray further and further from The Path.
Desire. A desire for something more than you have right now is what you need next. You’ve conceded that you’re small, insignificant, and ignorant. What will you do now? Give up and distract yourself with earthly vices? Or is there a pilot light in your soul that is struggling to light your inner furnace?
A friend is an entrepreneur at heart (currently a successful and valued employee at a large company) who is struggling to make the jump. He finds deep satisfaction in the hard task of plotting his three years from current reality to the new reality he can see. He compared himself to people around him, who took pride in doing the minimum necessary to not get fired, so they could go shopping, or vacation in Hawaii, or similar busy-but-empty behaviors. He’s not wrong.
They look at him as though he is an alien.
Not everyone has Desire to change. Some people just want to sit on the couch, drink beer with their friends, and talk shit about the Lakers. They are losers and they don’t know it.
That’s as far as I got in my thinking while pacing downhill, back to home.