Missing in Action
THE STOP SIGN
It's a long weekend here, and I've got a long list of links to sort through for next week's double-edition Best Of. Even with heavy culling, that promises a lot of reading for you then—so a slightly shorter piece today.
I’d intended to wrap up the idea of the fundamental fitness principle, the subject of recent posts, but there is much more to say about how it helps and hinders.
(The only way it hinders is by working against it.)
Still, this isn’t a series. These ideas don’t stack neatly or resolve linearly. Any related concept may apply in part or whole, together, alone, or not at all— yet. So there is nothing sequential about it.
You might still be thinking: I’ve got better things to do than play these mind games. I get it. And trust me—if you don’t, I do.
But if we take one or two of these angles each week, the hope is that it becomes clearer how they—and everything—connect to that fundamental principle. That with their varying degrees of influence over you and each other, they are all satellites orbiting the same Leftfield sun.
But most critically: why.
Your quality of life—your experience of life—while not wholly determined by alignment with this principle, is nonetheless informed by it first. And so it follows: alignment informs everything in your life.
And so far from being “mind games,” reading about this only helps you if it drives you to act. Not because this is true in its most literal—physical fitness—sense, but because understanding, even agreeing, even acting on it at a purely intellectual level is not the point.
Nothing more than a stepping stone.
So to begin further picking this apart: you'll have heard the idea—one I’ve repeated here—that a healthy person can have many problems, an unhealthy person only one.
But you can be healthy “enough” and still not act in accordance with what you are.
Conversely, you can behave in unhealthy ways and yet still be in accord with it. I do. All the time.
I’m not making a case for either here—only making a distinction between ‘health’— important though it is— and something deeper.
But why bother going deeper? Moreso, given the promised ever-present difficulties detailed last week, why bother at all?
And again, I’m forced to turn to what is misinterpreted as esoteric, secret, or obscure when it can only ever be described as more real.
Not merely a Buddhist Noble Truth, but the first:
Life is suffering.
Wonderful.
You can read those words, and it’s not as if you don’t understand them. You know what it means. You can further see that it doesn’t offer any flexibility of interpretation. No wiggle room, whatsoever.
(As far as we know) That's just how things are. And yet most do not understand it. Even as living proof—as we all, by definition, are—we still don't understand it
And yet, that’s about where most of the world is content to leave it.
Suffering. Uh-huh, got it.
As, of course, you do—the suffering, that is.
But still not the understanding— the insight.
Because if you give it another thought at all, it’s something like:
Suffering. Sure. I’m not sure what I’m meant to do with that, but okay.
And that ‘not sure’ is the proof you don’t get it.
It's either that, or one of the most venerated people in history became so by strutting around dropping hard truth bombs on people like a robed Jack Nicholson—you can't handle even the first truth.
But I don’t think I’m writing about him, 2,500 years later, because he was dealing out about the toughest love you can imagine. By all reports, he seems a lot more chill than that.
And he's not even trying to trick you. He's trying to make it as obvious as possible. But, in any case—no offence—my money's on you not getting it. I didn’t.
Now, I'm not conflating Leftfield with ancient wisdom—much less myself with Buddha, need it be said. I'm pointing out the same pattern: our overlooking reality— and one far easier to discern than suffering's finer-grained distinctions.
Furthermore, our mistake is rarely outright rejection, but the belief that we already understand.
Here we return to Peter Ralston's Zen Body-Being: for the distinction:
However insight comes about, it occurs as an experience, even if it is an experience that occurs only in the mind or awareness. Yet is not merely an idea, thought, belief, conclusion or guess. It is the realisation of some truth that is grasped at once and with certainty. Having an insight suddenly clarifies something that was previously unclear, even unseen, resulting in, and often from, a shift in perspective and a much deeper understanding of some matter.
You’re not representing something, or having an idea about something; you’re grasping a principle. This grasping is the experience of the principle.
Similarly, at a deeper level of understanding—of looking and parsing far finer distinctions of suffering (attachment and aversion, specifically)—you arrive at the insight.
And with that insight, you suffer not just less, but as little as possible.
From which we can determine three important points:
Some suffering comes wholly from our misunderstanding.
It’s not that suffering “changes,” but that—with insight—your relationship to it changes.
And the most fundamental of all truths when it comes to any principle: Once you see it, it’s you who does the changing. Not the principle.
Never the principle.
Principles aren’t argued into existence, defended, or negotiated with. They are either perceived—or they aren’t.
Another way to realise this distinction: you can experience gravity without experiencing the principle of gravity. Indeed, one of the best ways to 'experience' gravity is not to grasp the principle.
Short of that being fatal, it will help you grasp it.
The same holds for the principle we’ve been examining these past weeks: you are anatomically made to be fit. To not be fit is to deny what you are.
Like suffering, this is obvious. Self-evident. Undeniable when stated plainly.
And like suffering, most people think they understand it—but don't. Not at the level of insight.
What I have been—and will be—doing is mapping why certain reactions reliably appear when these principles are brought into view. Not to rebut them, but to make their source visible. Because resistance, confusion, or offence usually isn’t intellectual disagreement—it’s contact with something that threatens an existing strategy, identity, or coping mechanism.
All human behaviour, after all, is an attempt to solve a problem.
But as a quote often attributed to Lincoln alludes to, there are good and bad ways of going about it. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Gyms are now full of people attempting to solve a problem. Though less full than a week ago. Those who have left— and will leave in the weeks ahead— have abandoned the idea of getting fit.
Not because they lack effort. Not because they lack discipline. But because they're driven by urgency, aesthetics, comparison, cultural pressure—the dullest of axes—instead of alignment with what their structure actually needs.
Even when they know, intellectually, the long list of reasons for doing so. And of course they do.
Even if, intellectually, they accept the premise of that fundamental—made for it—principle.
Missing that sharpened insight, they can’t see the fitness wood for the trees.
We know that because they stopped.
And stopping is antithetical to the principle.
QED.
Not because they believe their non-alignment solves a problem, but because they are solving a more superficial problem. Nonetheless, they are in or out of alignment with this principle.
Not in the past, or at some point in the future, but right now. And were. And will be.
The unrecognised confusion of those unaligned with the fundamental is that they believe, at some level, they’re better for it.
But this is only possible through disconnection from the fundamental.
Missing the insight that:
If I stay in alignment, I feel better at every level.
If I don’t, I don’t.
An insight you will never get just from reading.
Enjoy your weekend
- OLI