Remembering the Way

As I often do, I was in the gym yesterday working out and trying to figure out what I was going to blog about next.

Classes haven’t started yet at the university, but people are starting to come back to campus.  I work out at the ratty old gym on the outskirts of campus, the one that only gets cast-off equipment from the newer, hipper gym smack dab in the middle of campus and is frequented more by older grad students and faculty than by undergrads.  The undergrads strut their stuff for each other at the hip gym.  My gym is old, crusty, and somewhat smelly.  People who show up there are actually serious about working out.  I like that.

I was in the process of giving up thinking about blogging and just concentrating on my workout when it hit me.  I had lost the Way, at least at that moment in time.

The essence of Taoism is often expressed as not trying too hard.  That statement is fairly accurate, but it’s incomplete.  There is also, I believe, a such thing as not trying hard enough.  One should ideally intuit how much effort is appropriate to an endeavor and expend that amount of effort unconsciously.

It’s difficult to be a Taoist when you’re a native and present American.  Our society is just not cut out for someone who strives not to strive.  Such a person is seen to lack ambition, or energy, or purpose.  None of those things are necessarily true; the Taoist’s energy, purpose, and ambitions just run counter to those of the prevailing American culture.  Or perhaps not counter to it, but perpendicular to it.  Most elements of the culture attempt to pull you back in, accelerate you when you would rather stand still, drag you to a halt when you would rather move.  It’s frustrating at times, but even that frustration is a form of struggle.  A true Taoist should be able to find a way to be carried along.  As a friend put it, to achieve the illusion of stability by seamlessly changing along with everything else.

When I’ve blogged in the past, I’ve attempted to force things out because I have an image that a blogger should write every day.  Now I have enough things in the can that I could go a week or two without a new blog and still get by on my old material, so I’m really free from that pressure.  And coincidentally being freed from that pressure has allowed me to open the pane and let my thoughts spill through, and writings have come more easily than before.  What I needed to do yesterday was stop trying to think of something.  When I did, sure enough, something came through.

It’s like my workouts.  I used to push myself too hard; then I didn’t push myself hard enough.  I was comparing myself to other guys in the gym, comparing myself to what I thought my wife and/or random female passersby in the gym or elsewhere would like to see, comparing myself to the guys in Ads & Muscle & Ads & more Muscle & Ads & Ads & a little bit of Fitness magazine.  Or even to myself:  setting goals and measuring progress is, after all, the bodybuilder’s creed.  But it wasn’t working for me.  It wasn’t making me happy; it was making it seem like another damned job.  A job that came with an endorphin rush, yes, but it didn’t seem like something to do for recreation.  I couldn’t do it unselfconsciously.

Now I don’t push myself quite so hard in some ways, but strangely when I’m done I seem to have done just as well, without hurting myself even.  I have a routine that I vary enough to keep it interesting, and if I’m not feeling all that good on a particular day, I cut it short in one or another part and don’t worry about it.  I’m enjoying myself a lot more.  It’s become a lot more fun again.

I got into that bad frame of mind a time or two while motorcycling.  I got an image in my head of what a “good” motorcyclist should be like, and tried to push myself to that level.  Hanging off in the corners, not because it was necessary or helpful but because that’s what I thought it should be like.  Working on my slow-speed maneuvers because I wanted to look good at it rather than BE good at it.  The difference is subtle but influential.

It was pushing myself in that way, a little beyond my comfort zone, that led me to crashing, and taking away the good things that lay behind my bad frame of mind.

I promised myself with regard to motorcycling that, when and if I ever get the chance again, that I remember that I don’t have anything left to prove to anyone, especially myself.

But more broadly, that’s true in more or less every facet of my life.  I’m 33 years old, and I have nothing left to prove to anyone.  Not even myself.  Especially not to myself.

I have some things I can improve, and that’s cool.

And there’s a whole lot of fun out there to have.  That’s even better.