Humble Pie
We start from the premise that fitness is a must.
[If you reject that, I can’t help you. Good luck out there.]
But while many do accept this obvious truth, few treat it as such. And it comes long down the list of priorities, as chore, luxury or hobby.
The best way to address this is to give fitness its fair due and view it, at least, the same as other ‘serious’ pursuits—none of which come nearly as close to influencing the quality of your life— and approach it as a practice.
It’s well accepted the best means to a desired end is to focus not on the outcome but on the process—that which you can control—but we’re going to continue exploring the many properties that make this practice approach a vast improvement on that fundamental principle of behaviour change.
Most obviously because the process you’re intent on following may not be leading to the desired outcome. One not in your best (fitness) interests.
Ask 10 people how to get fit (including dietary and other lifestyle behaviours) and you’re likely to get as many different answers. All coming courtesy of that hostile information environment, few won’t have an answer when it comes to any fitness question.
So our frustrations are less because people don’t know what to do but because they do, with society now serving as exhibit A to Mark Twain’s warning:
It’s not what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
Perhaps by comparison to music, dance or (mistakenly) meditation, we fail to see fitness as complex or demanding enough to warrant a practice approach.
So we just bash away at it. And those observing consistency and dedicated to process are still left splashing around in the shallow end of the pool, by contrast to what a practice offers. Many more give it a miss entirely.
The solution is to start, cap in hand, from the understanding you know nothing. A blank canvas from which all (fitness) knowledge will ultimately come via the prism of your practice.
This particular virtue— humility— being less a property of practice than its defining quality. As Steven Pressfield writes:
…when our motivation is grounded in our ego, we do not have a practice. Or to flip that statement on its head, the aim of a practice is effacement of the ego.
And when the practice takes precedence that’s all you need to worry about: tending to it. Yes, like a garden. And everything else takes care of itself.
Just reading that will, hopefully, sound like a burden lifted. Indeed, any protests can only be coming from that being sidelined. But then our humility in this regard should hardly be a stretch. Where exactly are these laurels we might be resting on?
The conventional approach to fitness has demonstrably failed and few are at ease with their body or enjoy anything close to a basic level of fitness. This simple shift confers both a due, and much-needed honesty on the task at hand but solves every other problem besides.
Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Consider the dojo, studio or cathedral. But these are spaces not delineated by their bricks and mortar but, as any sensei, minister or yogi will tell you, by the mindset we bring to the space.
The unbounded influence of a fitness practice throughout your life makes these edges non-existent so next we’ll look at why, here too this makes a practice not just the best, but only approach.
Build the practice. And the practice will build you.
This is the first call for Leftfield Youniversity 2024. Beginning Friday, June 28. If you’re committed to reading only at this point. That’s fine. Set a reminder right now for one week from this minute.
Name the reminder:
Am I giving my fitness its due?
And I’ll be back then.
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI