‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live’
Menu
By voluntarily choosing to do challenging things one gives themselves the immense opportunity to practice and strengthen a broad range of human capacities. These capacities (some examples being – self awareness, self control, discipline, courage, grit, determination, resoluteness, the list goes on..) when expanded and strengthened, raise you to a new level of being above some of the inevitable suffering life brings to us all. Where once you may have been dragged down into that quagmire of human weakness, now you and your newly forged capacities hover above the painful states untouch. Therefore, for our general psychological and emotional wellbeing we should endeavour to relentlessly hunt out and impose genuine and sincere challenge on ourselves, gifting ourselves the abilities to continually soar about the pitifulness of the human condition.
If you desire to calmly float through your days no matter what stresses come your way (and why wouldn’t you?) then do something physically hard to start your day. Once you’ve accessed those depths of voluntary discomfort, the rest of your day will be easy.
Therefore, go running, go to the gym, head to the sea before the sun comes up and tell me it didn’t make a difference to how you experienced your day and its challenges. N.B – I am not talking about a leisurely jog here or a gym session where you hardly break a sweat. I am referring to training sessions where you have to fight for positional integrity against the physical stress and discomfort your will to push yourself has elicited.
Remember: Do not make any decision inside the first 5 minutes of waking up. This is when your mind is at its weakest and least primed to make good decisions when facing challenging acts. This is also a powerful practise to bring into your life.
Recommended: It is fundamentally important to make a cognitive association between the action and reward of that action. Therefore, if this is not something you do in your life at the moment or have never done, I advise a trial (of the practice) where you set it up to compare the experiences of both days.
Let’s take Monday to Thursday – Monday (status quo), Tuesday (6am hard gym session), Wednesday (status quo), Thursday (6am hard gym session). Follow this sequence and pay attention to the internal state differences (and how you react to situations of ‘stress’) in your between the days.
‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live’
~ Seneca
