A Parable About Practice: Nothing Gets Easier & There is No Rescue Party

A few years ago I decided to prove to myself I could keep up with high performing athletes.

As I've written before, I've never been secure in my athleticism - but I needed to do this. 

I began by finding one of those gyms where former marines work out and they do tricep dips with chains on their shoulders like The Rock and have weekend retreats where they shoot assault rifles. My goal was to get to the point where I could keep up with their regular training sessions at 100% intensity. 

I was starting from zero, so I began working on the side with one of the coaches to learn the movements, get clear on my baseline and determine what gains would look like for me. After a dozen or so sessions, I was ready to hit a regular class.

And it rocked me.

No joke - I finished a 6:00am class and went home, got back into bed and slept until 2:00pm.

In the following weeks I participated in a few more sessions and, though I wasn't having to take naps anymore, I was still stumbling to my car, laying the seat back and trying not to black out for a few minutes.

I found myself frustrated at how much of a toll this work was taking on my body. I recall thinking to myself, One day this will be worth it. You'll get the gains you want and this will be easy like it is for everyone else.

Early one morning after a series of brutal sprints I was laying on the floor in misery next to a big industrial fan. A guy who'd been going to the gym for a few years sat down next to me and said between pants:

Just so you know man, this doesn't get any easier physically. It's your mind that changes.

And here I was doing this because I believed one day I'd unlock the next level of athletic ability and be able to perform with ease.

I thought there was a fitness nirvana one could reach where you stop feeling lightheaded, never get tunnel vision, and it ceases to feel like you're pushing scalding magma through your veins.

Nope - according to my sweaty friend you just learn to like it.

Just like you learn to like waking up early, and writing 750 words every morning, and meditating for longer periods of time, and pausing before reacting, and eating foods that benefit your body, and reading instead of watching another show.

Nothing gets easier.

We simply learn to fall in love with a different way of interacting with the same activities which once sidelined us.

We develop new ways of thinking about trials and challenges.

We realize participating in pursuits that push us actually strengthens muscles inside our brains which allow us to rise to higher levels of being in, and interacting with, the world.

But we can't do this if we’re chasing the fantasy that one day all the hard work will be over and whatever challenging thing we want to master will become effortless.

Our objective should instead be to fall in love with the practice of whatever it is we endeavor to do, treating the daily process as the end in and of itself.

When we stop believing we'll be delivered from the pit of pain, we deliver ourselves from the greater pain of false expectations. We become capable of fortifying our insides and learn to march on with gratitude for the chance to participate in this life at all.

Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us of this beautifully as he points out the important distinction between loving practices and loving results: 

There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.

And the beautiful, paradoxical magic of all this is, when we return to the practices and participate in them for their own sake, the outcomes we were once distracted by have a way of being even more meaningful than we originally imagined. 

The only way to learn to love something or someone is to put in the hours. I'm sure there are examples in your life when even the prickliest of people have grown on you after you persisted and looked for different ways to interpret their tendencies. But this takes time.

There is no rescue party.

The work doesn't get any easier.

We simply learn to rise to the challenge by forgetting our fantasies about how big our muscles or company or brain will be one day, and instead fall in love with the small activities we get to perfect along the way. 

These days, I don't go to the gym with Vin Diesel anymore but I am intentional about my own regimen of painful practices I'm learning to love. 

Here's to the process.