Why I train, why I be! & just one guide in such reflection

Finally! A day to blog.

Spartan Race has their little #whyirace which is awesome, and hopefully gets people to ask their why beyond the medals, mud, or even just the "fun" experience on the mountain, but that's not where my why has started.  I've inflected by feeling on my reasons and motivations even before explicitly describing them.  When I applied to the United States Naval Academy during my junior year of High School, I learned to give rise to those feelings via effective communication, or whatever my lack of communicating that was.  After most of my interviews finished, I talked to a Naval Academy grad who said I need a "story".  That "story" may have been developed better, but it doesn't matter to me as much as how I feel my identity in my memory's story (see Locke on identity as composing of one's explicit memory).  Today as I apply to American Ninja Warrior's College Team edition, I see the importance of "selling" oneself - the artificially created importance to "success".  The Dalai Lama has preached we should be more compassionate instead of desiring or striving for material success.  And many people who might be called gurus emphasize the move to simplicity of commitments and material possessions - see one of my favorite trainers, Mark Divine - so that one may serve each commitment wholeheartedly and for good reason and to leave the world a better place.

So I try to steer myself away from extrinsic reasons and feel around for the intrinsic ones.. A meditation requiring focus, simplicity, and few distractions.  Among some of the things I've felt as good reasons for training, racing, involving myself in the community (particularly of Obstacle Course Racing or OCR, but also in classical Yoga pursuit - read the Yoga Sutras and familiarize yourself with the eight limbs of it if you think it's another stretching routine - and in fitness, in life) are that I can help other people, inspire people to move as they see me move, keep myself moving, healthy, disciplined, and also be more conditioned to save lives.  I plan to serve in the military and the Peace Corps or as a humanitarian for a while, and so this training is integral to that.  But even if I did not have those goals, I would still believe it is right to be training, to be capable of aiding yourself and others.  If you do not have the ability to carry someone out of a burning building, they will stay in the burning building, and more help will not always come.  Self-reliance and self-discipline do not simply revolve around the self if the self is situated in a social justice environment...

That is our natural environment.  A social atmosphere.  Altruism is actually an evolutionary theory now, and I am happy to say I took a course in Social Evolution under Robert Trivers, who proposed that theory!  So let us enjoy helping others by situating ourselves to be self-reliant and in that sense, most effectively interdependent! These whys might be put into mathematical formula one day, but no formula will ever give us the feelings which we experience with a specific, yet ever changing activity - we will be more uncertain about all of time's collection in activities when we focus on a moment of an activity in time and vice versa. These whys are special to us for that reason: we cannot actually encapsulate them and reproduce them, or truly compare them, for every moment is born anew.

These whys may not be described effectively by language.  I think J.S. Mill and even Emerson might say that these whys for their intrinsic good should be pursued for how they make one feel without any need for words or quantification of pleasure (more so Emerson than Mill maybe), but it is nice to explain (rather, attempt to) the preparation, pursuit, the reward and the good done in what one does.  A phronimos (essentially possessor of practical wisdom) would do things because they would understand by their good nature that these things benefit others and themselves:

  In many discussions, the word "habit" is attached to the Ethics as though it were the answer to a multiple-choice question on a philosophy achievement test. Hobbes' Leviathan? Self-preservation.Descartes' Meditations? Mind-body problem. Aristotle's Ethics? Habit. A faculty seminar I attended a few years ago was mired in the opinion that Aristotle thinks the good life is one of mindless routine. More recently, I heard a lecture in which some very good things were said about Aristotle's discussion of choice, yet the speaker still criticized him for praising habit when so much that is important in life depends on openness and spontaneity. Can it really be that Aristotle thought life is lived best when thinking and choosing are eliminated? (From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

These whys can't always be quantified, explained, communicated, or even reflected on to begin with. So don't worry too much about if you cannot tell right away what it is you are doing or why or how long you should be doing it.  But if you feel rather than seek,  you should learn from nature how to walk and how to act.

Back to simplicity, the reasons why may not readily present themselves because of the distractions about.  But if you really meditate on these ways, letting go of the material distractions about you, then you will start to "get it".

Start letting go. Start feeling, not why or what or when or where, but it.  THE supports of nature itself, the daos.

Simply,
Grant

http://www.goodwill.org/

Here's a deeper talk with Mark Divine on the feeling aspect I've discussed, and on "manhood" but clearly can be felt either as a man or woman or human hood.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DfVyY8R2BI