Dialing It In
Practitioner. I like practicing. Self experimentation is fun. Change is good. These are the lies I am constantly starting to tell myself as I reach down to my coffee bean grind to turn the dial, making a finer grind to see if the coffee tastes different in an aero press. The lie is repeated as I roll my yoga mat out onto my floor, using my BaseBar to perform pull ups, body weight rows and other exercises in my small apartment, much to the dismay of the dog staring at me from the couch. Her eyes ask why I do such weird exercises when there is plenty of hiking left out there to do in the world. The mantra is repeated in an attempt to spark an almost reverse imposter syndrome on myself. If I say it enough times maybe it will be true, maybe I’ll stop being afraid of heights, maybe I’ll focus. Narrative is an important thing in life, meditation brings awareness to the contradictory thoughts in my head so I can scream the opposite at them, manifest what you want to be.
Not Less Scared, Only More Brave
I have been ravenous when it comes to my reading this year, and I have been trying my hardest to absorb the lessons learned. Last year one of my favorite reads was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I misquote it frequently when trying to recall lessons, and stumble through formulations, but the best New Year’s Resolutions I have ever made came from it. Take more risks. The premise is simple, every decision we make has inherent risks and humans are highly loss averse, losing hurts more than winning feels good and this work is further outlined in Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. I’ll save the explanation to get to the meat of my resolution, which is even if some of my small risks don’t pan out, the more I take the more that will pan out and overall my life would feel more vibrant. It’s this resolution that led to things like performing Mr. Brightside karaoke during a hot Yoga class, letting my friends, Zane and Lexi, drag me out backpacking and rock climbing, jumping with my GoPro at Tuck and Robin lakes, and a few awkward dates that while maybe they did not pan out, made for some killer stories. The point of terrifying myself with public performances and heights is not that those things will all of a sudden become baby tigers, but rather that I will grow learning that what I once viewed as dragons are manageable. I won’t be riding motorcycles anytime soon and that’s okay, I just do not want to be crushed under the weight that failure is always a bad thing.
And that’s another lie I am proud to tell myself, I am brave and it is okay to fail. It becomes apparent every time I step into Vertical World in Seattle and start climbing a wall, the tracker on my watch starts spiking despite my snail’s pace headed up the wall. Standing there, clinging to rocks I have seen numbers like 168 beats per minute, my tell tale heart. My fear of failure is evident in my picking easier routes, or that moment of hesitation before trying to pull off a risky switch for fear of sliding off the wall to be yanked back to reality by the rope going taut. A wake up call each and every time, yet the longer I climb the more I notice my mind slowing and the more times I fall per trip (I’ll never get over double and triple checking the harness every time I strap in). That’s the thing about lies you tell yourself, if you can find the vein of truth lingering in them and mine long enough, they eventually start feeling less and less like lies. I am still afraid of all the things that can happen in life, but I realize with each next step I take and nothing happens that it is better to live and push through that fear, becoming bolder and braver has expanded and given me more life.
Tweak, Not Overhaul
Part of becoming braver and more bold is trying new things, but no things do not always have to be radical. This form of boldness in living is a shift in mindset to consider everything, being mindful, and noticing the differences. The change of 0 to radical is not a change just anyone can make, and that includes me. I can’t just hop on a motorcycle and take it all in, I have to find my little edges where I can build this out, small decisions that make me realize maybe a change is not so bad. Each experiment I perform increases my likelihood to push the boundaries further, testing the limits, the desired effect from rock climbing can also come from something as simple as changing up my morning ritual. Coffee has been pretty standard in life, but I have been moving on from drip coffee and really expanding my horizons since moving to Seattle. I have a set up for pour overs, French press, and aero press now and I have been using beans from Black Rifle Coffee, but what’s the difference in the methods? Or even better, when using my electric burr grinder does it even make a difference? I have been running small experiments this week with the Space Bear micro-batch I ordered in an effort to perfect my grind, and my cup, but also realized that temperature control on the water I use is so important, the key is small variations. It is these small incremental changes that I can start noticing the smaller things and improve.
It’s a pretty good metaphor for life, honestly and it is a pretty important lesson that I don’t think I ever learned to this degree now that I am making it explicit. Dialing it in is all about making a small change and going again, you fail or maybe have an inferior brew, but then you go back and tweak again knowing that with each successive step you get closer to that morning glory.
Working Towards Higher Ideals
There can be a lot of emphasis on how to formulate goals, how do we make them quantifiable, explicit? How do we handle them once we achieve them? Personally, my goal is to get over those questions. I want to be somewhere spiritually/emotionally/mentally different than where I am at now, making progress in my life and those questions cause a phenomena that is called analysis paralysis. Often times I can drown in ambiguity, working over the problem in my head as I try to optimize the steps I could take. This work out plan, or this one? Learning guitar, do I watch this video or this one? Which song do I play first? Recently, and my hope in changing my mindset to the frame that I am a practitioner, I have been just sitting down and doing the first thing I can drive myself to do. Instead of freezing in place, I want to keep moving, to build momentum and make tiny shifts as I move forward. I cannot fathom every issue I’ll run into along the way, so sitting in my own head to build a hypothesis and then the test to pick it apart inevitably takes up more brain cycles than just pushing to start the test. I am going to fail miserably, in these blogs I am going to have terrible voice, but the goal is not to be polished, the goal is to seek. Seeking, but what? I am unsure. Each post, essay, or journal entry I write to myself seeks to further brush away the fog lingering over my lost city. Instead of leaving all my thoughts in my head, I want to speak them aloud, breathing life into my ideas to test against others, to formulate a set of rules for myself. My personal philosophy. Rules and writings are meant to be simple reminders to myself as I struggle with decisions, cairns meant to mark the path I have taken so I can make my way back, stumbling forward in life. There is always a vague fear in doing the unknown, and there is always a way to rationalize why you should not do something, narrative bias is strong and it is easy to tell myself that no one will read this, I can just simply fold these pieces of myself up and place them back into my pocket. There is no chance for unease if you simply say nothing of your thoughts at all. I want to rewrite my own narrative though, to reveal smaller pieces of myself and show them to people in an efforts that both they and I can understand myself more fully, accepting the discrepancies that all sides see and allow for deeper connections.
