DIALECTICS AND STAGNATION

In spite of my best efforts at being careful, I managed to strip one of the bolts that holds my seatpost to my frame. This simple, little thing was, as it turns out, not so easily remedied, not by me anyways. Eventually, I was saved by the talented and immensely responsive crew at GEARS BIKE SHOP IN LEASIDE, my hat goes off to them. They have been really good about seeing me right away with minor issues and their mechanics are more easily accessed than any other store in Toronto, making them the most user friendly bike shop the GTA in my humble opinion.

The experience got me thinking about various forms of stagnation; how and why things can feel stuck, the necessity of dynamism, and what life, in and outside of endurance sport, feels like when things stop moving in the direction you want them to.

This morning, while running painful 1k intervals underneath cloudy and windy skies,  I thought about the concept of "radical acceptance" and also about dialectical materialism. My own personal dialectic, involves the space that exists between my lofty and distant Ironman goals and the day to day reality of training. I am still not too far along that road, so I am lucky that my personal sense of momentum and change is still pretty robust. Yet, I can see that this will slow down, and that the closer I get to my goals, the slower things will feel.

 Up until now, my greatest fear, has been to do the same race twice and not see improvement over the previous year.  My nightmare of stagnation came true  this year, in Syracuse, where my time sucked even worse than the year before. Sure, there were reasons to point to, rational ones, but it did take a bit of time and meditation to fight the feeling of being stuck, or moving backwards.

I know where I would like things to be and that is not where they are now. This is the almost perpetual state of every endurance athlete and it maps out well onto the human condition in general. When I was in my 20's, I always felt like I was working towards a vision of health and happiness, personal growth, spiritual enlightenment, that would come in time. I had many moments of epiphany and happiness in my 20's, but I think I was less present most of the time; more in my head, more living for a promised future than the present moment.

Now that I am older, I think I realize, that what I have, in real terms, is the present moment. That is, at the end of the day, all that really matters. We are never stuck if we are present in the moment. I can still work towards some hoped for future, but it will be no better than the here and now, just different. That is what I mean by radical acceptance. Things are what they are. I am who I am, at each moment, and that is OK.

One final thought. Part of who I am, is that I am a body in motion. I am not static. My reality is quantum, in as much as my precise location or direction cannot really be measured or quantified at any point in time. So, being present, is really no less fuzzy than living for the future, but it is more real.

I love the Soundgarden song I have referenced above. It served as my person anthem of indignant stagnation during my 20's. I still resonate with the lyrics now...but the more that I practice radical acceptance, I realize that, freedom to exist fully lies not in erasing the dialectic between what I am working for and what is, but in embracing it.