Defiance

I used to listen to Jocko quite a bit.

The guy is relentless, I’ll give him that. That’s one of the qualities I was into him for, and hoping to absorb from him, but he couldn’t give me that. That’s the thing about looking to admirable people, they’re tough acts to follow if you’re not prepared to make the significant sacrifices required in order to follow along.

I used to watch a lot of high performing types. I’d get so hyped up while the show was on; I’d meal prep, I write up a workout plan and schedule, I’d listen to more inspirational input, and then I’d go to bed full of gusto, only I’d wake up the same old me, and I’d wonder where the inspiration went, where my willpower disappeared to. Blinded to my yesterday vision by some near-physical veil, I’d have to face my day.

It always got really depressing, and fast. Without the dubious solace of booze, I’d wind up falling into some other hole, like binge-watching tv shows, or spending days playing video games. I love video games, enough that I’ll probably have to write about why someday, but not today.

Not today.

Procrastination gets a bad rap, as does all inconvenient defiance. It’s well justified, but anything can be justified, however, that doesn’t mean it’s right, or even true. Just look at the legal system, an entire caste of society nurtured as the left hand of oppression to ‘uphold the law’, the law being the writ by which oppression justifies its very existence, and is itself, justified by fear. If you ever have doubts about the power of words, just consider that.

Things get pretty convoluted when you’re always searching for ways to make simple ideas make sense to your tricky mind. It’s so easy to just accept meaning as given. Procrastination is bad, do, do, do, go, go, go, get’er done, get after it, go hard, don’t put it off, do it now, don’t think, act!

But...what if you want to die? What if you’re so depressed that you don’t know what to do? What if you can’t work out because of the damage? What if you just want to go buy some booze or drugs, justified by taking that pain away? What then? Is putting it off until tomorrow still a bad thing? No, it’s not. Your defiance is a good thing. It is you buying yourself more time with a good decision, which is all that time is good for, as far as you’re concerned. Just one more day, sleep on it. You’ll feel better in the morning.

Isn’t that strange, how strong you have to be to be wrong?

You’ve got to be realistic about these things, though. High performance culture is just another religion built on the shame and guilt of people who have trouble thinking critically, and would rather give money away than follow its trail while holding a modicum of healthy cynicism. Just like religion and law, the foundations of the culture are sound, and everything that is not part of the foundation is absolute garbage and should be avoided at all costs, and certainly not fucking paid for. Stick to the basics. The more you attempt massive action, the more you’ll come to realize that it’s all just the basics, so relax and be happy with that because you’re going to wind up there one way or the other.

I like Jocko, though. His enthusiasm is...muted, and I can appreciate that. He also resonates with me because I always wanted to be a soldier when I was young, not just because I wanted to destroy my enemies, but because I think the concept of discipline, of knowing what I was doing, and what I was doing it for, really appealed to me. It still does. Walking the talk. I wanted to be a believer.

I think the most important thing that I learned from Jocko was to put things off, though. What he meant was to put off taking a day off of working out, and to put off taking a break from getting after it, and to put off being weak, but I’d tried all of that, and I wasn’t doing well at all, so I decided to just put off trying to be like Jocko.

Probably my biggest influence ever was Bruce Lee, not so much because he was an interesting and dynamic person, but because he said this: “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”, and I believe he did just that. Of the three, I think the last is prime. I don’t even think that you can effectively carry out the first two unless you take care of finding out what is uniquely your own.

I can work out every day, but I can’t work out like Jocko or Bruce because my shoulders and neck are buggered from decades of humping plywood, holding heavy stuff at arm’s length, and hitting my head because I was wearing a hard hat. * What I have to do is recover, reassess, retrain, renew, regain. It feels like I’m retarded, but slow progress means I’m not occasionally going backwards with calamitous injury, so I’m actually less retarded. More, since I’ve started procrastinating, I’ve discovered that I am able to take on new things, like school and writing, because I’m not constantly in a crisis mode that leaves very little time and energy for anything but itself, and I’m not longer using those few frayed scraps of impetus to shame myself for not being like someone else.

I want to do better. I am doing better, but not all the time, and guess what. That’s good. I think I have a pretty good vision of what’s right and wrong for me because I know that I’m not right all the time. I have to reassess, and consider what I am up to, and why, then decide whether a course correction is warranted.

I was thinking about taking a break from writing for a while. Not too long, but just long enough to....something, I don’t know, find something better to write about, maybe. I was actually ok with it, and if I feel like it serves me to do that, I will.

But not today.

Not today.

*As a side note, When my good friend and chiropractor read this, he mentioned that he seems to remember skateboards and general tomfoolery-and I will add dirtbikes-as contributing factors to my physical malaise, not JUST work, and he’s absolutely right.