An Engagement Invite
PRESENT COMPANY EXCEPTED
I spend a lot of time at the park. Dawn and dusk on most days. So I can’t help but get a very good feel for who’s who in the zoo.
In the morning, it’s invariably the dog that gets the outing, but in the early evenings, I see Mum and/or Dad at the park with the kid(s). And Mum or Dad — I guess in some cases it’s the nanny — are always talking on, or reading, their phone, and never interacting with the kids. Until home time: let’s go.
It seems to me as if they are going to the park only to say—or to tell themselves— that they have taken the kids to the park. Box ticked.
— What have you been doing?
— I’ve been at the park with the kids.
Technically true. But really, the only kid included here is the kidding themselves that this is in any way comparable to those who remain mentally at the park, with the kids.
Now, if you are saying that the kid is at the park, it’s not the worst place in the world, and at least they are outside and… yes, yes. I agree. My point is that mere physical presence does not make these the same thing. My further point is:
When are you better placed to take the additional benefits — for all concerned — rather than leaving them on the table? You are ALREADY physically in the park.
I’m not a parent, and if the scourge of identity politics has you dismissing this observation as somehow worthless for that reason, stick around because I’m about to bring this right back into my wheelhouse. Because the very same mindset applies when you take yourself off to the park — or anywhere else — to train. Or anything else.
Or everything else. If there is any truth to Woody Allen’s promise that eighty percent of success is showing up, it is surely only if the corresponding mental attendance has been assumed. Or a failure to state the obvious. More likely, it’s a maxim true only of its time.
No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.
SENECA
Oh, Lucius, you have no idea. No idea of a world where — by the same Orwellian inversion that gave us the 'smart’ phone — ‘engagement’ now measures the degree to which you have checked out.
Not engaged, but absent.
Elsewhere.
Gone fishin’.
When you exercise, are you merely ticking the box or are you truly present? Mindlessly going through the motions or paying attention? Are you engaged — in the original sense of the word?
Progress in any domain comes courtesy of successive iteration, but if you miss the feedback, you iterate nothing. And so you are spinning your wheels. Indefinitely. Wheelspinning is in itself some pretty clear feedback, but there are plenty who’ll miss that too.
I’ll keep saying it: your body and mind reflect what you do. Exactly. So if you want to look, feel and perform like you really don’t give a shit, you know how to go about it.
The alternative — deep, focused engagement — is not only not difficult with some application, it further offers blessed relief from the otherwise unwavering, ceaseless, mindless self-commentary. As to how you go about that, well it’s easy. You start by removing everything purposed only to distract.
The typical gym will usually have you on a treadmill or exercise bike, wheels spinning— injury or illness excepted — the most pointless forms of exercise known to man. If you have a wall of televisions in front of you— I’ve also seen magazine racks next to recline bikes— you’ll be better served by removing yourself from the distractions. And the gym. Music, podcasts, the news and — so help me, baby Jesus — breakfast television all gone.1
The next step is harder. Because now you are left to wrangle with that most dreaded, although increasingly rare occurrence of the modern day — the untasked mind. Luckily, you do have a task. You are training.
Take the hackneyed suggestion to dance like nobody is watching and flip it. Your focus now is to make every set, every rep, every movement look like you’re in an Olympic final. You’ll find this demands your attention — not only to how it looks, but to how it feels. How are you breathing? Are you breathing?
It’s not as if you will be able to do this all the time. Thoughts will keep intruding — that’s fine. Just keep coming back to your Olympic final. Set by set. Rep by rep.
Let’s just say from here on out that you can consider it written at the top of every program you ever do — in big capital letters — inviting your mind to the party:
OLYMPIC FINAL. PAY ATTENTION.
Along with the squats and pushups, you decide if you’ll do it or not.
Then training becomes an opportunity to both maximise the physical benefits on the table and hone a further mental edge into the bargain, something that will serve you equally well beyond the confines of the session as any physical exercise. Test-driving it in an environment that rewards it so surely is all upside.
Its absence can be somewhat more severe.
Mindfulness has suffered the same fate as engagement—a word that once meant something precise, hollowed out to smuggle in no end of quackery. Commonly mistaken for emptying the mind or a serene state of non-attachment, accessible via an app with a soothing interface and a monthly subscription, mindfulness is not the absence of thought but the direction of attention.
Awareness. Not the emptying of mind but filling it purely with what is happening when it is so often filled —to the brim— with anything but.
Our attention works in strictly linear fashion, the misnomer of multitasking, in fact, the fragmentary switching from one to another and back, its attendant illusion that this passes as an efficient use of our time when it couldn’t be less so.
But this too is a relic of times past, with technology designed to prevent even that.
I once rescued a child at the park whose phone-faced mother was unaware her toddler had slipped through the gaps in a jungle gym; his bike helmet had not, leaving him suspended by the strap, arms flailing. It’s not as if I was watching him either, and it was the quiet that alerted me.
Mum, deaf to the sudden silence of her child being hanged.
Not six months later, another. This time, the kid had curled up right behind the back wheel of a stationary, but engine-running, park worker’s ute. The parent oblivious.
Focused attention, then, while a prerequisite for anyone intending to improve at anything, is not merely a performance, ‘wellness’ —or child safety— tip.
It is the means by which experience is experienced— that life is lived. We know this, of course, and it’s not ignorance but avoidance that has us tapping out when life doesn’t measure up, and that too is our mistake. When you open yourself to the intricacies of the mundane, you come to realise that boredom often means you are not looking closely enough. The antidote to the session that drags, the cold drizzle, the burn, the remedy, in fact, to any resistance, is to attend more closely. To remain right in it.
People I would never want to spend any time with would say lean in, but whatever you want to call it, without it, your mind is only hitting the wavetops. Skimming past it.
And it, is reality.
It is your life.
You may decide it’s not worth investigating. A decision that can only come from distraction— but even then — is that not worth investigating?
Exercise is a gift to your body and mind; it is nourishment that, if we look to the Latin verb parere, meaning ‘to bring forth’, is just good parenting. You give your attention to what is meaningful. To everything that you decide deserves it. Towards whatever you wish to cultivate. And so you gift that too.
Because in our age of distraction, it is only the mapping of your attention onto that most precious, non-renewable resource, that makes no present like the time.
Enjoy your weekend
- OLI
The only exception being hill sprints. After years of testing, I've learned that both speed and endurance are improved by a heavy dose of Faith No More.