The Two Paths. Which Are You On?
I recently read a book called “The Forgotten Highlander” which recalls the story of a Scottish soldier in WWII who was captured by the Japanese and remained a POW for several years. Throughout this period he was starved, riddled with disease, tortured, torpedoed, and in Nagasaki when the nuclear bomb was detonated. There are two truths I kept thinking over while reading: Human beings are capable of doing amazingly difficult things when their minds are strong and pain is inevitable.
How does this apply to fitness?
Despite not being tortured as a POW and exposed to radiation from a nuclear bomb, I bet you still complained this past week? I bet you even felt a little sorry for yourself at one point. I know I did.
This is our nature, even more so in the United States. Because we’ve been exposed to AC, we are dissatisfied when we don’t have it. Because we have the option of sleeping in, we are unhappy about the idea of waking up early. Our natural bent is dissatisfaction, discomfort, and pain.
Yet, we are capable of doing difficult things in spite of and, sometimes, because of that pain.
Thankfully, we are not POWs and we actually have a choice in which pains we would like to accept and what difficulties we would like to face when it comes to our own physical state.
We can overcome the shame, the fear, and the physical discomfort and take our first step into the gym. The beauty behind this choice is that every step gets a little bit easier. Every inch of forward progress brings with it more skill, more confidence, and more momentum. The first step is truly the hardest and it gets easier the longer we continue.
Of course we can choose the other path. We can choose to accept the pain of neglect, the pain of regret, and the pain of self-pity. We can try to justify it to protect ourselves from the truth but that just brings with it another set of pains. The misery of this path is that every inch of retreat brings with it more shame, more fear, less skill, and more momentum in the opposite direction of progress. Each step becomes more and more painful.
Which path are you on currently?
David Allen
CEO
NBS Fitness