This is the video for this month. A little waxing about how we as humans like to insulate ourselves from the elements of growth
Here’s the transcription:
Stress, pressure, friction, and time. The 4 essential elements for growth of any kind. The elements of change.
Everything… from human perseverance… to precious gems, such as diamonds and emeralds… to thunderstorms… to sunflowers… to the eroded formations of the hoodoos – all are the product of stress, pressure, friction, and time.
Yet we as humans go to great lengths to avoid situations that put us under these types of duress, while fully acknowledging that nothing is gained, and no lesson is learned without them. We’ve engineered a life for ourselves that is geared towards avoiding these things so much that we’ve begun watching other people endure the elements of change as a recreational pastime. As entertainment in the form of televised sports and binge watching dramatic series.
We work jobs where we aspire to get to a point of comfort, and then commence trying to go unnoticed for fear that someone might expect more from us, or at least more than we can handle – so we hit the ceiling of what we’re capable of, rarely – if ever – trying to push beyond that. It’s by that logic that we can hypothesize that the entire world is run by people who are either incompetent at their given set of tasks, or overwhelmed by them.
The result is vicarious living, through our children, or our local athletes, famous movie stars, stand-up comedians, prolific musicians, or foul-mouthed politicians – whichever appeals to us more. These are the people who we’ve chosen to speak for us with our dollars and our social media posts – these people who do and say what we only WISH we COULD do and say.
They live and speak with reckless abandon – things we believe we could never get away with saying.
They endure the stress.
They endure the pressure.
They endure the friction.
They endure the test of time.
They do things we could never do. But why can we never do these things?
We’ve cursed ourselves with contentment, and we traverse a plateau that represents lack of inspiration and resolve. We’re neither happy about it, nor are we particularly sad about it – but all the same, we’re exhausted by it and deep down we want to change it.
We’ve insulated ourselves from stress, pressure, time, and friction to the best of our ability – but that insulation is made entirely of limitations. Our own limitations.
And the only way out is to embrace change.
The only way out is through stress, pressure, friction, and time.
Training this week has been awesome. We’re rounding out the month of June, carpool driving duties will be paused for a couple months, and that’s great because these sessions are getting longer and longer. The upcoming long weekend is welcome, but there won’t be any slacking going on in our training program, despite the inevitable social pressures to make poor decisions.
The weather forecast has been very inaccurate lately, and I couldn’t be happier about it. What once looked like a full 2 week period of nothing but rain has only left me soaked by rainwater once or twice (as opposed to being soaked in sweat, which is normal).
Soon I’ll be jogging the 14.5km commute to work.
Not sure how I’m going to get home just yet though… doing that run twice in the same day might be a little ambitious, but never say never. I’m thinking a jog to the nearby train station might bust up some lactic buildup in my thighs at the end of the day, and then I’ll take transit home.
The Conscious Pilgrim 