Last week was filled with exciting meetings and new opportunities and a little too much weekend fun, and now I'm paying for it with a relatively sluggish start to my Monday, but laundry's done and workout's done and bags are packed and a disappointing practice session is behind me. Tonight I fly out to Spokane, WA for a couple days to play with the symphony there, and after my last concert on Thursday I hop right back on the plane and hightail it to Baltimore, where I have a chamber music concert on Sunday. No rest for the weary! This is what you love to do! Keep repeating it until you start to believe it.
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You start to notice the most incremental changes. Walking with less of a slouch. The loosening of your jaw as you white-knuckle through rush-hour perimeter traffic. Hell, you even mind the traffic a little less. Your mood is better. More optimistic.
It might have to do with the fact that it was a tropical 77 degrees in Atlanta today. Springtime in February. Punxsutawney Phil has no jurisdiction here in the South. You walk the Beltline from Midtown to Inman Park to meet a friend for dinner. The Beltline is more packed than you'd ever seen it. Joggers weaving through lazily-strolling couples and ladies coupled with baby strollers and leisurely cyclists and speed-demon cyclists. You pick up conversation snippets of the privileged, gentrified variety. Dull and mundane, the sort of idle chatter you'd normally consider tedious and eye roll-worthy. Today you find it downright quaint, nearly--dare you say it--pleasant.
At dinner, you talk about life, art, social change. Making a difference. Being a difference. Being different. Wine helps. Dulls the intellect a bit, but replaces it with earnestness in spades. (Earnestness, The Importance of Being.)
You leave the restaurant and hop back on the Beltline, now shrouded in night. There's a lightness and looseness in your step, bequeathed by wine. The breeze is cool and fragrant. A half-moon hangs over the glittering city like a proud mama surveilling her brood from afar. You take the scenic route through Piedmont Park, now deserted and dark save for the tangerine glow of the street lamps, their light bathed in watercolored halos, Monet-ized by your wined-up vision.
You breathe deep and remember to cherish these moments, and you are grateful, but you also know the happy moments are always fleeting, and there is always more work to be done, and now you are home and you are nursing a comically large bottle of water and now it is time to commence construction on the unpaved roads ahead of you.
Last night at the gym I listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast interview with David Goggins, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one of the most inspiring interviews I’ve ever heard. In short, and at the risk of glossing over his many unbelievable accomplishments, it is your typical underdog story amplified to nearly farcical proportions. Difficult childhood, dreams of joining the military, fail, fail, fail more, found himself at nearly 300 pounds at age 24 working as an exterminator, decided to turn everything around (“From then on I was going to do the opposite of everything I did before”), failed some more, but eventually lost the weight and joined the Navy SEALs, doing an unprecedented three Hell Weeks in a single year (failed the first one, accomplished the next two). Then he turned his attention to ultra-marathons (his account of running his first 100-miler is equal parts awe-inspiring and stomach-turning), running (among many others) a 205-mile race in 39 hours. He also holds the world record for most number of pull-ups done in a 24-hour period (4,025). Of course, through all this, he was injured more, and then overcame those injuries (my main takeaway from the podcast was that I need to start doing yoga again, and pronto; stretching is no joke, people!).
What resonated with me the most was that Goggins insisted he wasn’t special, he wasn’t equipped with some magical go-getter gene that made him able to accomplish all this. If anything, it was the complete opposite. He doesn’t enjoy running. He doesn’t enjoy corporeally punishing himself to and beyond the brink of physical possibility. But he realizes that that’s what it takes to overcome those adolescent demons that kept telling him he was worthless, that he’d never amount to anything. So he proves to himself, through astonishing feats of willpower and mental cajones, that he is more than that stuttering abused child, more than that obese exterminator.
Don’t do something because you’re good at it. That’s weak sauce. Seek to make your weaknesses your strengths. Challenge all those doubts in your head telling you to give up, and keep pushing ahead. Embrace failure (this is the easier-said-than-done part for me. Failure has always been the boogeyman under the bed, and I’m self-swaddled under the covers, petrified). ”Be uncommon amongst uncommon people.” Do this every day. Make every day better than the one before. Then stretch.
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