Sacrifice
On my morning yomp (see lore for today), I was thinking about sacrifice. My alarm went off at 05:00, but I knew today's duration was short, so let the alarm re-wake me at the cut-off of 06:00. To get a decent sleep, one has to avoid revenge hours by going to bed 'early' - in my case that's usually 21:30 at the latest. This is essential because I train before work and depending on the day that can sometimes be longer than two hours in the morning.
This also affords me the luxury of a second training session over lunch.
What am I giving up though? What things that I want to do are being cast aside for this two-training-sessions-in-a-day strategy? What would I rather be doing?
Nothing - and that's the point.
Idk about you, but "sacrifice" conjures horrific imagery for me. Tens of thousands of Aztecs faced the blade so their heart could power the sun. At least that's what we understand them to have thought.
It's fairly easy to look back and on that as absurd, yet 'sacrifice' is a pretty common word still. Have you ever wondered why that is? I think it's because we are still doing dumb shit we shouldn't because we think we have to.
If I feel like I have to sacrifice something to do another thing, I'm almost certainly on the wrong track. I'm probably doing A Thing because I think I'm supposed to be and the byproduct of doing The Thing is giving up all this other stuff I'd rather do.
That's a properly weird mentality. If I'm doing something I want to do, even if it's hard, I'm kind of on rails. The scenery is whizzing by, but I'm not pawing at the windows whining about all the nice stuff going past me. I'm enjoying the view on the way to my destination.
That's the way it should be. We've been led to believe there is some moral imperative to do stuff we hate and put aside things we'd rather be doing. Things like homework.
Homework?
Hello little care free child. Go home and train to do unpaid work.
Fuck off.
So then, a thought experiment. Are you doing A Thing currently that almost perfectly lines up with your values but feels like you have to die to feed the sun god? Perhaps this Thing is a little bit more on the should-y side and you've been convinced - either by yourself or others - it's the right thing to do. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's time for a re-think.
It's important to realise that doing hard things can be intermittently miserable in the short term and it's very much okay to curse how bad this bit of The Thing you're doing is - but when you get out the other end it should feel like an accomplishment rather than a relief. One step closer to the whatever-we're-chasing.
If every day feels like a grindy nightmare of putting away childish things - of sacrifice - my position here is we should stop and take stock. Perhaps we don't want this Thing as much as we thought we did.
/eof
Lore for Today
Yomp is a possibly onomatopoeic word for heavy load carry for distance. I first heard it said by Royal Marines with reference to carrying house-sized bergens on their back for miles. The American equivalent is the term "ruck" which sounds just as stupid.