Winners Find a Way to Win; Losers Know Only Losing
Some people think the only way they will ever win, is by lying, cheating, and stealing, and so the first thing they do, is find a way to beat the system, rather than recognize that the purpose of the game is for everybody to win -- even when one ends up on the short end of the score. That’s not just a platitude. The reality is that some people are not as good as others -- and demanding that that is so, is a denial of reality, and the purpose of the game ultimately, is to discover reality -- the reality of our own possibilities.
But that another must lose in order for oneself to win, is not a necessary outcome of the event; each is there to do his best -- and not to disqualify and prohibit the participation of all the others, so that one can win. Such victories are hollow and meaningless -- yet we see it from time to time, from people who have obviously learned the wrong lessons about sportsmanship and fair play. The world is not that brutal and brutish, that every encounter is a grim struggle for survival against every other, for everything, regardless of need and how much one already has. Those are the important lessons of mastering one’s activities.
The greatest practitioners of any activity, never see themselves in a competition with any other. They are just being themselves -- which they were born and conditioned to be. They are grateful that society values and honors those abilities -- that they just happened to be blessed with. The mediocrities of the world can never understand that, because competition is greatest in the middle of the pack. At the extremes, there is no competition -- and often, not even company. One has to learn how to go it alone -- to go where none have gone before. The others will only go where many others have been before, and may even be insistent that everybody go before they do. These are not likely to be our leaders.
In fact, they may actually undermine those who are leaders -- because they have no courage and ability to be so. Instead, they will preach the wisdom of cowardice as society’s highest virtue -- because that is what they have in greatest abundance. One sees it all the time -- in the institutional man, the organization man, the assembly line cog in the wheel. If they cannot stand out, they demand that nobody else should either.
That is the tyranny of conformity -- and opinion. Towards the end of the last century, that was even the predicted trajectory of life in the future -- more uniformity, conformity, and consensus. For that world, what was needed were mass systems, requiring everybody to fit into the ideal of the average, instead of the vision of life in which individual actualization and fulfillment was now not only possible but inevitable for those who merely did not resist it.
It is a world designed for every winner -- as long as one has no fear of discovering what that might be. What one is likely to be a winner at, is a life of their own unique fulfillment -- but in the repetition of the past, there is only losing, for those were the games of the past. There’s no rule that says one has to play the games of which he is only assured of losing.
posted by Mike Hu @ 9:52 PM
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1 Comments:
The most overlooked aspect of contemporary conditioning programs, is that they totally overlook the mental aspect of conditioning -- or regard it as something separate and apart from the physical conditioning. Conditioning must be integrated to have any value. That’s why those machines that create involuntary contractions, don’t have much value -- because integral to that muscular effort, is the willful control of it. To have great capacity but lack the ability to control it, doesn’t have the great value it would if it were totally accessible at will and on demand, as a basic response to any challenge or stimulus.
In any task one undertakes, one wishes to put the total resources into play. That’s why, to train every muscle in isolation, rather than as an integrated muscular contraction, is not how one wishes the body to respond. One doesn’t want to condition oneself to lift a weight in the hardest way possible. The weightlifting strategy, is to making the lifting of the weight as easy as possible -- utilizing all the principles in the understanding of optimal and efficient movement.
Yet most of the elaborate conditioning theories, incorporate such implausible core principles. In the target heart rate emphasis, the presumption is that the heart has to work harder -- when in fact, it is always the hardest working muscle in every person, because its function is autonomic, which means it doesn’t need to be consciously addressed. That is the last thing one needs to worry about -- and needn’t be the prime concern. What needs to be the prime concern is conditioning those movements and functions that are purely voluntary -- and modifiable.
So in effect, one is attempting in that flawed training model, to change what doesn’t need to be changed, while ignoring those things that can be -- very easily,. A similar flawed justification for exercise, is the fallacious belief that exercise changes one’s basic metabolism rate as its objective -- all these aspects that are virtually unalterable, while ignoring those things that can be altered with great effect and productivity.
There’s a prayer called Desiderata, in which one notes this same eternal confusion, and asks simply for the wisdom to be able to tell the difference
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