I reached a place today where I’d like to reside for a lifetime. Just after the initial .35mi climb, there’s relief when you turn onto xxxxxxxxx. The grade goes negative, and without any effort at all, your legs carry you forward. Pre-run I decided I needed to do more. I needed to run into the downhill instead of coasting. That’s where I found the place.

The places that actually matter are never suburbs v. cities or country A v. country B. True, those distinctions make some difference, but only because you let them, only because superficial details seem to matter when one is distanced from what’s going on mentally. That distance isn’t such a bad thing – it certainly allows one to exist in the modern world instead of a cave in India. Furthermore, better controlling the mind is incredibly challenging. As much as I buy the truth of “mindfulness” and that paying attention is all that’s necessary to eliminate boredom and illuminate the world, it doesn’t mean I actually perform these skills.

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I relay this to you not to boast, but to remind you the strength of my weakness. The Friday we spoke was a “running day” for me. Unfortunately, a few hours after our conversation, it began raining so hard I couldn’t accurately decipher objects a few feet outside my windows. Worse still, my trusty iPhone SE, with the dope headphone jack, informed me it was 51 degrees, which happens to be the coldest temperature since I arrived in Ted Cruz’s great state a month ago.

No, I didn’t see this as any sort of “challenge.” I saw this as an excuse to push the run to Saturday, maybe even Sunday if the conditions remained unfavorable. I’m telling you, my weakness is so good at negotiating it could convince Kim Jong-un to unilaterally disarm. Just check some of these persuasive arguments:

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14, 13, 7, 4, 2. 2, 4, 7, 13, 14. Again and again and again. It’s not so bad except for 13 to 7. Mastering that jump cost me a few broken bones and pints of blood. The key, I now know, is to push off the black rock next the stairs with your toes instead of your heels, as is natural for novices. Once I got that down, I was able to put in a minimum of four hours per day.

The dividends have been life-changing. I chose the programming skill reward, which seemed obvious given economic trends, but apparently most people choose vanity skill rewards like charisma or sexual endurance. I now have a job at Google, a corporation that offers maximum schedule flexibility for Stepping, and money with lots of trailing zeros in my bank account.

It all makes me laugh that my mom had to essentially force me to start Stepping. All my life I’d tried to get better at things with practice, and all my life I’d failed to acquire any useful skills. Yet, the thought of moving up and down stairs so the NXQ3000 could alter my brain struck me as both stupid and dangerous. Now I get that my aversion was another personification of my “fear of success.” So glad that’s no longer a part of me.

For there is a learning formula and yet no commensurate method for unlearning the things we want to unlearn. Tragically, it’s trivially easy to unlearn that which we want to maintain (foreign language, musical ability, fitness, etc.). But the stuff that haunts us, the stuff we desperately wish to forget? Good luck.

Upon enduring radical change, particularly the negative variety, it’s natural to long for the way things were. With time, though, “radical” transforms into the new status quo; it’s simply unsustainable to indefinitely maintain a high-stress state – a defining characteristic of transitory periods. For better or worse, acceptance inevitably washes over us, which helps power our near unlimited capacity for adaptation.

The kind-hearted folk proffering this advice must not be comprehending what weakness is, confusing it for honesty, vulnerability, or “asking for help.”

Weakness is the inner voice urging you to be less than. To varying degrees, everyone will give in from time to time. But make no mistake, this act is never one to be encouraged since surrender increases the voice’s potency. If you capitulate too often, weakness’ power climaxes through silence; the once associated shame, guilt, and negotiations are no longer there to remind you that another way exists.

That other way is strength. It rarely offers superior hedonistic rewards, but in matters people claim to value most in life, strength is undefeated. Omnipotent it is not, though, for weakness never completely disappears. The best one can do is repeatedly win the daily battles by charging into challenge (a.k.a. the stuff weakness tells you not to do) and away from guilt (a.k.a. the stuff weakness tells you to do).

Talking to her was against the rules, but, as I saw him smiling, I realized there were no rules. Meat had laid out the “carnival plan” as a game; now as he was acting on the will to quench the simplest desires, a frequent occurrence in adolescence.

How do you control your mind? Rather, how do you force your brain to stop remembering?

They read “Keep,” “the,” and “Faith.” It stated neither to whom nor in what.

I searched some bookshelves, in a very ineffienct manner, for the late author’s work, discovering what I hoped to (nothing).

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The lesson was: DO what you like in life, not what you feel you “should.”

He valued “killers,” those with a single-minded focus who wouldn’t quit on a math problem until arriving at a solution. Simmons told another colleague that some academics were “super smart” yet weren’t original thinkers worthy of a position at the university.

Let the problem be … It will solve itself.

Sometimes I look at this and fell I’m just some guy who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

Truth is much too complicated to allow for anything but approximations.

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I feel like it’s easier to find someone who will admit to being a real racist than it is to find someone who will admit to being an extrovert. The charmer at the party? Oh no, this stuff exhausts me. The energetic go-getter simultaneously climbing social and professional ladders? You wouldn’t believe how introverted I am. The person who of his own free will chooses to interview strangers for a living? Not me.  

Fortunately, this once-in-a-thousand-years statistical anomaly of introversion overload offers a massive upside in a Covid-ravaged world. Beaten, broken, and drained from all that pesky interaction with humans, the introverts can finally recharge in solitude. Praise be to Christ our Lord!

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Someone can truly believe it, but not me, not us. And by someone, I mean someone who is not alive, because anyone still breathing is programmed to think The Terrible can’t really happen, especially this iteration of human which has seen little but peace and growth. That “little” offers still further proof against panic: we have been through tough times before and always emerged victorious.

Past results don’t predict future outcomes and all other foreboding clichés have thus lost resonance. We can understand them on an academic level – multiply this probability by that one – but not at a level where we truly grapple with the consequences of numbers that declare a nonzero chance that life forever changes in awful ways. The numbers are, actually, quite beside the point since there aren’t numbers for that which has never happened before.

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