Buddha Bike

  • Running wild

    Wilsons Prom, May 6 2023, 9:41am

    Ever since I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve also been running. Most of the time, I’ve run along the river near my home, but also around closed city circuits with thousands of people and on pristine beaches in the middle of nowhere.

    There’s a Chinese proverb that describes four basic postures of human activity. Walking, sitting, lying and standing. As for exercise, running feels a bit like the fifth posture. We know how to do it when we are kids, it requires little to no equipment and there’s no rules or regulations attached. Just run. It’s also natural. It’s a bit of primal behavior that can easily be woven into your week. Like gardening or camping, running serves a valuable function of connecting us to a simpler, uncomplicated world before alarm clocks and spreadsheets and ‘X’.

    I agree with McDougall that we’re all natural born runners, but what does that look like?

    Listening to your feet

    She judged her speed by the tickle of wind on her skin.

    Born to Run

    The kids accelerated when they felt frisky, downshifted when they didn’t, and caught an occasional breather under a shady tree.

    Born to Run

    Your body is an intelligent, finely tuned instrument. And your feet are no exception. Unfortunately, we tend to forget they exist. We plug our ears with loud music and forget all about the two very sensitive organs attached to the bottom of each leg. Instead, we tend to focus on the workout or the latest sports science approved technique. Ignoring, battling or overriding natural signals from our bodies is a sure way to run yourself into the ground.

    Turning down the throttle is also a tried and trusted way to maintain and persevere your energy as you run. It’s like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. If you squeeze desperately and mindlessly, you’ll get a spurt of it and have to readjust to get the rest. If you are careful and watch what you’re doing, you’ll be able to get it all out in one go. Energy is always a finite resource, but if managed right you won’t run out of it as quickly.

    Chasing antelope

    50,000 years ago, a hunter would chase an antelope on feet. Their attention would be mainly focused on their target, but also on their bodies; their thirst and that sore left ankle that was playing up again. They would also need to be aware of their surroundings. All animals from sea anemones to giraffes need to have these two different ways of looking at the world. Iain McGilchrist explains that if an animal is “only paying one type of attention, it will not survive because it will become prey to another creature very quickly. It needs to have a different attention, which is broad, open and sustained.”

    Generally, we suck at that second kind of attention. But it can be helpful and pretty easy to practice while running. A simple way to do this would be to try and check in with what’s above your head. You don’t need to look, or think about it. Just check in. Get a sense of how far above your head branches are hanging. Are they close? Or is there sky? Are there noises up there? What kind? It’s easy. Your body is very good at this.

    Take advantage, give up control

    Take what comes to you and take the advantages out of it rather than resisting it and trying to make it into something it isn’t.

    Iain McGilchrist

    A man never rises higher than when he does not know where his road will take him.

    Nietzsche

    Never know when it will end. You can’t control it. You can only adjust.

    Born to Run

    I’ll admit it. I track my runs with an Apple Watch. I even glance at it from time to time. But although I find stats like distance or duration helpful, anytime I’ve properly dug into the data (and at this point I’ve got a lot of it), I can’t say I’ve ever been struck by an insight that’s improved or even changed the way I run.

    If you’re looking to run further, faster and have more fun doing it, I’d focus on mental flexibility rather than more technology. No matter how good your computer is, it’s not going to prevent a bad mood, a wave of fatigue, a flash of rain or a pothole where you least expect it.

    Technology can plan every turn of your route, keep your heart rate beating like a drum machine and shave seconds of your PB. It extends human control, and a little bit of control is fine. But it doesn’t have all the answers. It’s better to embrace the chaos and uniqueness of every run rather than fighting against it.

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  • A Meaning Vacuum

    A selection of thoughts from the last 7 days.

    Going Infinite properly introduced me to Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s a well written account of a shit-show that only humans in the year 2022 could pull off, but I was most interested in Sam himself. He’s undoubtably a fraud and a criminal, but also seems to be devoid of what Jung called the feeling function.

    • To feel is the sublime art of having a value structure and a sense of meaning – where one belongs, where one’s allegiance is, where one’s roots are. – Robert A. Johnson
    • He doesn’t understand the concept of beauty or even the point of happiness. As he wanders around playing puzzles, tapping his leg, judging everyone and committing financial crimes he seems to vacuum meaning out of the world.
    • On belief: “Didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine” / “And if you can’t think your way to a belief (why bother)”
    • Art & religion: “Felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd.”
    • On human beings: “Sam could read others fine. The problem was that Sam did not care”

    John J. Ray III is a clean-up expert who is appointed as the FTX CEO once they file for bankruptcy. He is tasked with the unenviable job of finding the billions of dollars Sam lost. What was interesting was that he didn’t talk to Sam.

    • John Ray had learned a lesson the hard way. One of the crooks he’d replaced engaged him in conversation and then lied about what had been said. In the first few days after he signed the company over to Ray, Sam reached out to him, over and over, with these pitiful emails. Hey John, I’d really love to talk. Ray took one look at them and thought, No way, José. – Going Infinite

    You can’t trust the guy who made the mess in the first place. If you want it done properly, you’ll have to figure it out by yourself. I think this is a great principle when you are dealing with yourself. When you are feeling particularly lazy or gripped by a foul mood, you need to treat your own thoughts like a hostile information source. You’ll want to listen to them, but you shouldn’t and you won’t be able to use them as evidence.

    Ryan Holiday’s book about discipline has created more questions than answers about the topic for me. What actually is it? How do you get more of it? Should we have more of it?

    Let’s say I’ve been swimming for nearly an hour in the pool. The set asks for 600m more. After 200m, I’m thinking of getting out. What exactly is the force that keeps me in the pool for the remainder?

    What if discipline is simply the removal of self imposed barriers? What if discipline is simply saying “why exactly can’t I get up at 5am – what’s stopping me?” “What exactly is the reason I should stop this run early?”

    Discipline is something that I’m pretty familiar with in my own life. I seem to respond well to it, but I’m also somewhat aware that it’s a dead end. I’ve written about chasing discipline with my diet and where that eventually leads. There were positives and negatives but ultimately discipline doesn’t solve all your problems like you think it will.

    “Thought is peculiarly individual, communicable only in words, and establishing barriers between the fool and the sage whereas emotions unite.”

    R.H Blythe

    “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”

    Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

    In the forest there are 2000 trees. But if you look at it closer and accurately, every tree is a personality. No two trees are the same. – Marie-Louise Von Franz

    One final dig at Sam Bankman-Fried. Another thing that made him different to most was his “willingness to assign probabilities and act on them.” Although he’s an extreme case, the world does seem to encourage us to spend more time thinking rather than feeling.

    The danger with a statistical approach to life is that although it might help your ability to make snap decisions or to get ahead in business, it drains out the meaning. “Reality consists of an enormous amount of unique” beings and stuff, and slapping simple labels, measurements, weights and probabilities turns it into a dreary video game.

    A lack of meaning is why most people rock up to therapy in the first place – complaining that there’s nothing unique or special about their life. For Sam, for whatever reason, a lack of meaning didn’t seem to be a problem worth solving.

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  • Discipline is Destiny – Book review

    The Stoics, like the Buddhists, liked making lists of stuff, and virtue, what they considered “the highest good”, is actually four different things. Wisdom, courage, temperance and justice.

    Ryan Holiday has decided to write a book about each of them, and I’m going to share what I think about Discipline is Destiny, the second in the series, detailing the virtue of temperance.

    The positives? Ryan Holiday is a smart, productive dude, and he reads a lot of books. Any book you pick up by him will have a high chance of containing an interesting quote, anecdote or lesson from history. As much as I’d like to say that I’ve read 1300 pages detailing the life of Robert Moses, it’s easier to peer in via an airport paperback. Discipline is Destiny is no different than his other Stoic Buffet™ books, and I’ve listed out my favorite quotes below.

    The negatives? Ryan’s industrial strength reading and note-taking ability becomes his weakness, as he struggles to weave together all these nuggets of wisdom into a coherent whole. Like his mentor Robert Greene, he’s a systematizer. He looks for patterns, connects the dots and applies scaffolding to make sense of life. But unlike like Yuval Noah Harrari, Nassim Taleb or Alain de Botton, nothing really fresh emerges from the system. This book felt strangely dense yet fluffy at the same time. The sporadic insights from Ryan are index-card sized. What is missing here is a book-sized insight. Without a central argument, or even strong chapter structure, contradictions start piling up. On one hand you’re nodding your head at a piece of wisdom, and at the same time glancing up at the chapter title and thinking really?

    Toward the end of the book, Ryan writes that “the four virtues are about instilling character – good character- so that at the critical point, a person’s true nature kicks in.”

    That is an interesting idea, that I wished was explored more. It’s not like some self-help author invented the idea of discipline to sell books. This stuff, along with the capacity for courage, love, wisdom etc is in us already. Which makes you look at the instructions and examples from famous people a little differently. Did they actually know what they were doing? Or did that particular virtue come easier to them? Is the sword-saint of Japan or a five star general doing something special, or just being themselves, in a way that looks special to the outside eye? Some of the characters here clearly worked extremely hard to stay disciplined in their fields, others simply don’t seem to have an off-switch. Even Ryan is quick to say that none of them (the Queen included) is perfect.

    Off-seasons: A feature of athletic life that those of us in other professions should consider adopting.

    Absolute activity of any kind leads to bankruptcy. – Goethe

    Epicurus had a surprising definition of pleasure: “sober reasoning, searching out the motives of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul.”

    Marcus Aurelius tells us to chill: Don’t feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions.

    Freedom is an opportunity for self-discipline. – Eisenhower 

    On Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuous life: “While in the White House, I always tried to get a couple of hours exercise in the afternoons.”

    Word I hadn’t heard before, and I’m unlikely to ever hear again: “Military commanders speak of the value of celerity.”

    E.B White turning down an invitation to a prestigious commission like an absolute boss: “I must decline, for secret reasons.”

    “When you have nothing to fear, your mind becomes dull.” – Floyd Patterson

    “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” – Churchill. Can you say the same? All that stuff you do/eat/drink/say every day. What are you getting out of it?

    William Thalhimer, a jewish businessman reflecting on dealing with an anti-semitic: “I came out here to purchase that piece of land. I got the piece of land. It belongs to me now, not to him. That man can go on cursing me as long as he likes. I have that land.”

    Money is exactly what he deserves. – Musonius Rufus

    “Why didn’t you do your best?” Admiral Hyman Rickover asking Jimmy Carter a particularly hard interview question.

    Cleanthes, a stoic philosopher, came upon a man berating himself for some failure. “Remember,” he said kindly, “you’re not talking to a bad man.”

    “Lift me up and hurl me, wherever you will. My spirit will be gracious to me there – gracious and satisfied.” – Marcus Aurelius

  • Toughing it out

    Laziness is contagious. We’re supposed to just nod along like it’s normal that everyone’s just surrendered to a banal existence?

    Nyad (2023)

    “I get tired of sitting on cushions. Cushions in my car, cushions on the chairs at home, everyplace I go they have cushions.”

    Lou Gehrig

    I’m running late for a group ride. And I just realized I didn’t pack my helmet. At this point, it’s very easy to call the whole thing off. It’s a valid excuse, and I’d definitely get to jump back under the covers. However, I choose the ever so slightly harder path, rush to get my helmet, and made it to the meetup point with a few minutes to spare.

    There’s nothing particularly disciplined or uncomfortable about what I chose to do there, but these small, forgettable moments hold a great deal of influence on whether we actually stick things out. Diets, workouts, projects, relationships, can all die from the smallest wounds.

    Marcus Aureliuus famously questioned our need to huddle under the blankets and stay warm, but comfort seeking is built into us. Take a look around. We prefer comfort wherever we can get it, from the daily routines that make up most our lives to the support and familiarity we seek from friends and community. You’re probably even reading this from a comfy chair. So if we’re ever going to stick to a diet or workout, at some point we’ll need to face this wired-in tendency for laziness and comfort-seeking.

    The good news is there’s no need for extreme feats of endurance. We simply need to find small ways to stop quitting and giving in when things get tough. In every aspect of lives, we need to tough it out.

    A lot of adulting boils down to being okay with what’s laid in front of you. We can complain about our responsibilities, but eventually we do them. You might not get excited about filling up the petrol tank, budgeting or getting your teeth cleaned, but at some point you stop resisting and you accept the responsibility. It wasn’t always like this though. At some age in your life, cooking dinner for yourself would have been a painful, herculean task, and now you just do it. Why should exercise be any different? We’re adults when it comes to vacuuming, why can’t we be adults about exercise?

    We’ve all got a picture in our minds of what disciplined or discomfort looks like. These pictures and beliefs are usually informed by our upbringing, conditioning or latest action film we’ve seen. We think we need to push ourselves harder or go further than we’ve ever gone before. But that’s performance, not discipline. Toughing it out is simply how you respond to any little moment where you want to give up. Whether we’re a novice, or a professional athlete, any workout will present a number of little obstacles. It could be obvious (a massive hill to climb) or extremely subtle (a niggling scratch on a finger). But how you respond matters. Do you give in? Do you take an easy way out? Do you cut corners?

    Taken to the extreme, seeking voluntary discomfort can come across as silly, entitled and masochistic. In Living with a Seal, this taboo is explored in a light hearted way when a well heeled businessman invites a Navy Seal to be his live-in personal trainer. We never learn much about The Seal aside from his love of push-ups and contempt for lazing about. I wanted to know what he was thinking as they go for a run around Central Park in the middle of the night. Did he find this stuff meaningful? Did he enjoy it? Was he laughing on the inside at the absurdity of it all? He’s a man of few words, and we get no philosophy, reflections or even a reason why he’s so disciplined in the first place. The message really did seem to be that simple: discipline and discomfort do some good.

  • Partly cloudy

    It’s just one of those days where you don’t want to wake up
    Everything is fucked, everybody sucks

    Break stuff – Limp Bizkit

    When I’m clutched by a bad mood, a simple question like should I go for a swim? becomes increasingly difficult to answer. My brain goes in circles. Hours before I was looking forward to it, but now I feel different, negative and not like myself.

    But with a good habit in place, I can drag myself to the pool even when I don’t feel like it. Predictably, by the second lap, I can barely remember my previous state of mind. Happily deluded thoughts dance in my head (see, it always works out, what was that fuss about?) and like a hangover washing off in the shower, I’m close to forgetting my stern pledge to never drink again. I’d be happy to forget it too, if it wasn’t for the fact that this same, uncomfortable routine has played out thousands of times before.

    Isn’t this strange? Shouldn’t the mental havoc caused a bad mood warrant a deeper investigation, or dare I say it, a solution?

    Five years ago, I took a stand against a bad mood. I had wasted a weekend feeling listless and loathing for no apparent reason. I then proceeded to waste more time dismantling my brain to figure out where I had taken a wrong turn. Once I felt a bit better, I concluded in a blog post that I had been stuck in a comfort zone and needed to be more aggressive and take more risks. Not a bad course of action, but really just more neurotic chatter. I had thought my way into some internally approved solution and moved on with my life.

    You contain multitudes

    It only takes a little concentration while you wash the dishes to notice that we are constantly thinking. Marie-Louise von Franz, a disciple of Carl Jung explains how your mood and thoughts interrelate: “You’re in a friendly mood. Then you think of something negative and then you muse about revenge. We constantly switch moods.”1

    Our personality changes too. It’s not hard to reflect on all the different people we can be. You might be monk, a benevolent businessman and a hedonistic playboy all depending on context. A bad fight might bring out a different, previously unknown side to our partners. Office Christmas parties are known to feature some hapless employee showing their true (or worst) self. Not only do our thoughts and moods constantly change, but our selves do too. Yet we tend not to notice.

    In extreme cases, we might call this shift a possession. In primitive cultures, rituals are conducted where mediums are put in a trance and “certain gods, female or male enter them, and they speak in a changed voice. The god speaks through them. Then they are possessed. They become the horse and the god becomes the rider.” 2Emerging from the trance, they often have no memory of what happened moments ago.

    It sounds extreme, but perhaps this is a helpful analogy for the effect of shifting moods. Psychology seems to think so.

    Archetypes, Parts & Circuits

    Over the past 100 years, psychology has given us some useful tools for peering into the black box of a black mood.

    • Internal family systems is a therapeutic model developed in the 80’s that breaks our mind down into various parts or subpersonalities. These parts can take on roles and characteristics that may be adaptive or protective in response to past experiences or current challenges. For example, “firefighter” parts that deal with intense emotions can be seen as responsible for binge eating or addictive behaviors. Author Jenna Riemersma explains that “when our parts… have taken over, we feel like we are the part. When our Angry part is up front, we feel angry, act angry, and speak angrily. We often think we are an angry person. The same goes for Sadness, Anxiety, Control, or any other part. When the part is in control, we have to speak from it. We speak as though we are it.“3
    • Jung defined the Anima as man’s internal ‘other’, a “feminine image which guides and shapes the way you relate to women and the world at large.”4 When a man is involuntarily possessed by his Anima, he becomes “spineless, moody, sulky, passive yet overreactive to small slights, indecisive and lost in fantasy, stuck in a fate that his repetitive patterns have chosen for him.”
    • Harvard trained Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor was used to dividing the brain physically, until she had a critical left brain stroke and had to re-learn different parts of her brain from the inside out. She describes the left/emotional brain as a character. “If I get upset and can’t resist calling you nasty names, my Character 2 has possessed my brain and is out of control.”5

    When a strong mood suddenly enters us, we become that mood. We believe those negative thoughts are our own thoughts. We’re involuntarily possessed, taken over, deluded, submerged, flooded, immersed, engrossed or like Bolte Taylor dramatically describes as “engulfed by a blinding fog of desperate emotion.” No exaggeration needed.

    While these different schools of psychology might have different words for these parts (and endless metaphors for how they behave), both Jungian scholars and brain scientists choose to be curious in the face of debilitating moods.

    Bolte Taylor tries to notice her own physiological reactions, “a recognizable furrow in my brow” or a “stiff body posture”. “If I choose to become fascinated when I start feeling prickly, curious about the charge, that is often all I need to deactivate the circuit from running”.6 For Von Franz, her animus can change her mouth and hunch her shoulders up and forward. Weirdly specific, but useful it keeps you in charge. “If you know (something has grabbed you), you can steer it, kick them out or play them and put them aside again.”7

    Curiosity huh? Worth a try. But although I can remember where I wrote that blog entry in my Brooklyn apartment, and roughly how I was feeling, it’s impossible for me to get in that same headspace. Perhaps because it wasn’t really me. And maybe tomorrow, for a few hours, I won’t be me again.

    1. https://youtu.be/v13PUb9sC9s?t=5131 ↩︎
    2. https://youtu.be/v13PUb9sC9s?t=5066 ↩︎
    3. Riemersma, Jenna. Altogether You (p. 187) ↩︎
    4. https://appliedjung.com/anima-possession/ ↩︎
    5. Bolte Taylor, Jill. Whole Brain Living (p. 92) ↩︎
    6. Bolte Taylor, Jill. Whole Brain Living (p. 266) ↩︎
    7. https://youtu.be/v13PUb9sC9s?t=5206 ↩︎
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  • Nowhere to hide

    Sensing types are not up in the clouds. Their feet are planted firmly on the ground. They like to get their hands dirty. Talk shop. Sensing types are found in a rugby scrum, behind a bar at a busy restaurant, planting trees in a garden or walking the streets with a nightstick. The Swiss countryside is filled with hearty, earthy sensing-type farmers.

    I’m not a sensing type of guy. In fact, it’s likely my weakest cognitive function (how we prefer to interact with the world.)

    Swimming laps is something I love to do, but also helps me to get in touch with my immediate surroundings and dial up my sensing. But as an introvert, it’s always easy to retreat when things get tough. You can give up and finish up practice early. You can waste 50 laps lost in thought, with no real repercussion. And although I usually train in groups, these are all ultimately individual pursuits. Recently, I’ve tried out rowing, which is another activity that sensing types love to do. But unlike swimming, cycling and running…

    Rowing doesn’t let you hide.

    Being present isn’t a nice to have when you’re rowing, it’s compulsory. When you’re rigging the boats, all the details matter. Order, size, colour, space matters. If I take a step out of place, I’m knocking over oars or damaging a hull. I’ve got to listen and look around me constantly. Once you’re on the water, you need to concentrate and row in rhythm with the other guys in the boat. Sensing types love this sort of thing. It’s concrete, practical and when everything fits together, there’s a beauty to it.

    But for me, my mind is going absolutely berserk, looking for an excuse or an exit out of there. Doubt, fear, confusion and endless criticism make it uncomfortable to get in the flow. Rowing shines a very bright light on these habits with an exhausting amount of feedback loops:

    • Stability in the boat is important. If one oar lifts up too high, the boat is immediately off balance.
    • The tenser my body is, the harder I grip the oars. The harder I grip, the harder it is to square the blades, and the more my hands get blistered.
    • What matters most is probably keeping in time with the stroke. The feedback for a lapse in concentration is a horrible clang of oar on oar.
    • We think that negative thoughts help us to improve, but any thinking at all tends to take you off track. Paradoxically, the thought focus on the stroke takes you out of rhythm.

    For brief moments, we find some peace. There’s some encouragement over the loudspeaker. ‘That’s good. More like that.’ You are surprised to find that you are both relaxed and concentrated. You’re not smiling and serene but you’re not frustrated either, you’re in the middle. You’ve forgotten about the time, but you’ve recognized for a brief moment that you really are sitting in a boat on a river.

  • Unleashed

    This time I’ma let it all come out / This time I’ma stand up and shout

    My way – Limp Bizkit

    Imagine you’re walking down a street and you come across a little black, scruffy dog. It’s still a puppy, but it ain’t cute. It’s been abandoned and it’s dirty, shivering and smelly. You don’t ignore it, you adopt it and take it home with you. It lives together with you in your house, in fact, for the rest of your life.

    Here’s the catch. You aren’t aware of doing any of that. You barely remember the first time you saw it, and you sure don’t believe that you’re its owner. This is your personal unconscious, or what Jung called the Shadow. It’s mostly mundane stuff, that could be conscious, but your ego has deemed it as distasteful, uncomfortable or unfit for public consumption. It’s taken the liberty to wipe it out of existence. Out of sight, out of mind. The trouble is, the trash never gets emptied and often ends up stinking up your life in all sorts of strange ways.

    Pushing and squishing are two ways we unnecessarily add to our shadow.

    Pushing

    I used to think the world was an extremely judgmental place. It was second nature for me to interpret a glance or tone of voice as disproving or even mocking. It couldn’t feel any realer. But as you might of expected, that wasn’t the case. It was actually me doing all the judging. I had simply pushed my own judging out of awareness.

    It’s not just judging, it’s anything you don’t claim responsibility for. A coworker you are certain is dismissing or avoiding you might be your own avoidance that’s been ignored and pushed out of awareness. It’s a bit like trying to hide a tennis ball underwater. No matter how hard you push it down, it will continue to surface in different (and usually unrecognizable) places.

    Squishing

    (Choking him) was one of the greatest gifts he gave me. Because I stopped being polite, and sweet, and appeasing of people.

    Joseph Zinker on Friz Perls

    Life is constantly throwing us challenges. We get knocked around by others. Taken advantage of. We need to make tough decisions. Especially for people like me who tend to be very deliberate and careful about how they act, this means a lot of time holding myself back. I can also tell myself that it’s easier or better to simply agree or go with the flow rather than say no or be combative. But buried within these habitual responses are things that I actually want, and I’m not doing.

    Seeking a resolution to an argument or stating your preferences can be quite stressful in the short term, and we tend to avoid it. But there’s a cost. Shrinking back, squishing feelings, fence-sitting and violating your own ethics all contribute to the shadow. The consequence of not speaking your piece, can manifest as unprovoked insults, black moods, violent outbursts or worse. We are all familiar with the extreme cases of blow-ups and meltdowns, mythologized in stories like Breaking Bad and Fight Club.

    Walking the dog

    What do you do with a dog that’s been chained up in the basement, has presumably a horrible appearance and is startled by the smallest noise?How can we take care of this beast (without setting it loose on the neighborhood)?

    One way to take this dog for a walk, or find a balance between creativity and destruction, is by doing something out of the ordinary. This works to knock the superiority of the ego, which always thinks it’s in control and has the final word on everything. Here are a few ideas:

    Put your foot down

    Making it clear exactly what you want feels uncomfortable in the moment, but also doesn’t create any resentment. You want a beer instead of wine? Say so. Speak up. Express yourself.

    Change your clothes

    We’re all familiar with that faintly embarrassing, but energizing effect of something like temporary tattoos. One tiny thing and suddenly you might take yourself more or less seriously. Any change from the ordinary can be good. Since our personas can become very rigid and fixed, clothing is a great lever to play with. Wear speedos if you always wear jammers, or singlets if you always wear shirts. By messing with your uniform, you are recognizing parts of yourself that may have previously been papered over and hidden.

    Think darker

    I’ve written before about the power of visualization. Since your unconscious can’t tell the difference between a “real act” and symbolic one, it can be very energizing to imagine the profane, the stupid, the dirty, the embarrassing. It sounds ridiculous, but see if you run/swim/ride faster and with more vigor when you imagine that the sensation of sweat is actually blood or the runner behind you is actually a knife wielding maniac!

    With a small amount of deliberate attention, we can both walk this dog and stretch our own legs.

  • Conditions

    Epictetus was an emancipated Greek slave turned Stoic philosopher living in the Roman Empire (55-135 AD). Many of his thoughts around what it means to be free have been collected into the short book Of Human Freedom. Using lots of examples from his own life, friends and culture of that time, he makes the case that cultivating (psychological) freedom was the ultimate goal of human life. Freedom, ‘the power to live our life the way we want’, and the peace and happiness that comes with it, could be achieved by giving up a desire for things to be a certain way and accepting things as they are. The opposite of freedom is slavery. External stuff like reputation, money, fame chain us down, simply because they are never truly in our control. How can you be free if there is any sort of dependency or condition on that freedom?

    How do we get free?

    Freedom therefore needs to be developed internally and be a total surrender to fate. It can’t be anything less. He talks a lot about the will of the gods, but this hasn’t got anything to do with faith or religion. It’s simply an acknowledgement that life is mysterious, complex, ever-changing and impossible to control. Any sort of manipulation, tweaking or what the Buddhists would describe as clinging is like slamming the brakes on a car that’s already sliding on a sheet of ice. Painful and not very useful.

    Peace is hard work. Change is uncomfortable.

    Freedom doesn’t come easy. And if there is a cliché image of the Stoics as miserly, grumpy men in rags, Epictetus comes across as the grumpiest. To him, the stakes (your peace and happiness) are high. Like a strict teacher, he wants nothing but your best effort. We need to take this introspection and reflection really seriously.

    Not only does it take hard work, but a more stoic approach to life will change how you behave and respond in daily situations. Let’s say you’re a competitive runner. By recognizing that you are attached to your race results (external), you’ll naturally recognize that you can’t be happy if those results don’t go as planned. You might develop a healthier relationship with your running but it’s also going to be hard for you to race so blindly again. This is a common trade-off. Change is uncomfortable. It could be a diet. You might start to watch your snacking and suddenly find yourself battling nagging thoughts that you have ‘become boring’ or ‘too strict’. 

    A common response to dealing with both the relentless reflection of Stoicism and the messiness of earthly life is to go and metaphorically live in a cave. Like devotees to any religion, Crossfit or new self-help book, it’s sometimes easier to blindly follow the rules. The problem is our minds. We can automatically bias toward behaviors that our minds have deemed to be safe and comfortable. Epictetus calls this out by asking us to consider why we read books in the first place. Books “are helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.” An introvert will happily do all the hard work, as long as it happens in their quiet study.

    It can be difficult to get some separation between ourselves and our biases and proclivities. Here’s an example that shows how we tend to avoid uncomfortable stuff. Read it slowly and really see if you can feel your response:

    “When you do this, it will drastically change your life and behavior. Things won’t be the same.”

    See? I didn’t even say anything and yet a part of you likely felt some resistance. Maybe your mind dismissed it with an eye roll “oh yeah right, that won’t happen.” Or tried to temper it and control it “um that sounds a little bit extreme.”

    If there’s a condition, you’re not free

    Recognizing that your mind sticks blindly to preferences and ingeniously covers over its own trails is hard to do. It’s like a really good magic show, where you are both the mastermind behind the trick and the awe-struck audience. It can feel a bit like trying to negotiate with someone who is gaslighting you.

    For months after I read Of Human Freedom, part of me felt confused and conflicted. My mind could not accept the contradiction that it had created for itself. The idea of mental discipline felt incompatible with relaxing control over my actions and embracing the random, chaotic nature of everyday life. The more I dug into that resistance the more my mind tried to point me in another direction, tried to make me to stop, to throw out the book or to dismiss my confusion as unimportant.

    Ultimately, my mind was very happy to practice some of the ideas of Stoicism on the condition that it remained in a safe and comfortable zone. But freedom has no conditions.

  • A lone Swim – Sunday #1

    Photo by Jordi Moncasi on Unsplash

    Trialling a new way to write publicly. Rather than preparing an article every week, I’ll share some of my personal notes. Here are a few of them from the past week.

    Big fish

    On Saturday afternoon I swam some laps by myself. This used to be a very common thing for me to do, but for most of this year I almost only swim in a squad. So swimming some laps as the sun went down felt very nostalgic. It reminded me of swimming laps at the appropriately named Lone Mountain in San Francisco. When you have the lane to yourself the view is like what an airline pilot might see at night as he prepares for liftoff. Two lines stretching away from him. It’s a view that doesn’t get old. You’re not truly alone of course. There’s little interactions with others in the neighboring lanes. There’s the sound of children laughing and divebombing in the far lane. There’s the sun reflecting off you. And there’s the water that’s always there, but never the same. And there’s problems too. Boredom. Questions like:

    • 38 laps, should I round out to 40?
    • How many laps have I done?
    • Are we there yet?

    When you swim with others, there is more comparison, more structure and more pain but I rarely get bored, and in general time passes faster.

    We need both. In every aspect of life, we need to do things alone and with others. Swimming is inherently a lonely, individual task but doesn’t to always be that way. 

    Small fish

    • Notice what makes you finish a task slightly before it’s finished. What are you feeling and thinking when you decide to finish at 38 laps rather than 40? There’s usually some very subtle sensation there.
    • My swim coach told me off for slacking and I got really angry. I was saying to myself “but I’ve done so much hard work.” It’s an obnoxious, righteous part of myself. The fact was, I was slacking off. For me, I think this is actually a disguised craving for acknowledgement and praise. Funnily enough, I struggle to accept praise even when it’s handed to me fairly and squarely. Go figure.
    • How to forgive yourself / others: “I didn’t know what I was doing.” “They didn’t know what they were doing.”
    • Spring Haiku: Spring drizzle / Browsing at the picture book stall / Umbrella propped up – Anonymous
    • “Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.” – Zen flesh and bones
    • If you ever find yourself chased by a monster in a dream, the best thing to do is to stop running and turn to it in friendly way and say “Here I am, what exactly do you want?” A good analogy is a ringing phone. Pick up the phone.
    • “People’s mind have become restless. Since they have money, they spend sleepless nights. Thinking about what to buy. Though we don’t have money, we sleep in peace. Our minds relaxed.“ – Zanskar monks
    • It actually feels unsatisfying to generate new ideas because you’re not consciously doing it. It’s not the same feeling as writing a to-do item and ticking it off. You can’t say to yourself “I’m going to focus and come up novel, creative solutions.” You can only supply the intention, the material and be receptive enough to greet the idea when you have given up (in a shower, a walk etc). Your ego is simply too proud and deluded to admit it that it can’t come up with good ideas.
    • Ben Shelton’s celebration. There’s something so striking about someone standing still while thousands of people cheer for them. It reminds me of Michael Jackson at the 1993 Super Bowl. He bursts through the stage only to stand dead-still for nearly 2 minutes. Can you imagine the energy of 100,000 people, revved up by the football looking and screaming at you all at once?
    • “Lie down. Morning is cleverer than evening.” – Finnish and Estonian folk tales

  • The intruder

    It was obvious within the first five minutes.

    Balls weren’t bouncing where they should.

    No one could volley, or rally, or serve.

    This tennis lesson was a disaster.

    Everyone looked dejected. What was going on?

    Our coach found it funny at first, but quickly lost his temper. He’d stop us, wave his arms about, gesturing wildly. “Guys. Gentle. We want to keep the ball in, yes?” We’d listen and nod solemnly and then go right back to what we were doing, which was, playing terribly.

    I know what it feels like to lose your mojo, but I guess this is what it feels like when a group loses it. Even I was getting worse and there was nothing I could do about it. I started to blame the other players, but that only worked for a while. I was missing easy shots. I couldn’t hide. I had no excuses.

    I looked around. I felt like I could notice the level deteriorate in real-time. There was something different that night. There was a new player who had joined the lesson. We can call him R. R hadn’t been playing tennis at the club for all of winter, and I suppose with the first hint of a balmy night he had decided to get back into the swing of things.

    R was rusty from the get go. He was impatient. Irritable. He hit the ball with venom, but had no control. Once you get to a certain level of tennis, you can’t help but try and sniff out other players’ weak spots. If someone’s backhand is leaking free points, it’s like there’s a giant neon arrow hovering over that side of the court. The worse he hit, the more we hit to him.

    That explains why he was playing badly, but why the rest of the group?

    I wonder if any group of people (children in a classroom, firefighters, airline attendants) quickly build up an implicit understanding of each other. Even if there’s not much of a relationship or even friendship, you just start to know each other.

    With tennis, you’re picking up stroke style, movement, strengths, weaknesses, but also personality, temperament and probably a 100 other little things. Over time, even the loosest groups build familiarity, ease and cohesion just by knocking around the same 4 or 5 square meters.

    When someone like R enters the mix, playing really bad tennis, the group can’t help but get disrupted. It’s like a large rock getting chucked into a quietly flowing stream. It takes a second for the group to realize there’s a new element, re-route and build up an invisible bond again.

    Something as insignificant and fleeting as a grumpy mood can end up have a bigger influence than you think. And although we all like to think we are in control of our own behavior, when we are part of a group, we are often behaving as one unit – for better or worse.