A Guide to Suffering: Acknowledgement
Snap Out of It.
…I build a script for my mind to follow that goes something like: “What am I feeling? What do I need? What do I want?” And most importantly “What can I control in this situation?”
There’s an image in my head from my first bike race. I see it with the same clarity as the picture of my kids that I have on the desk. It was a 6-hour race through the Shenandoah mountains in Bentonville, VA.
In the picture, there’s a patch of brown, dirty singletrack that’s bending to the right. At the far edge is a steep drop-off of maybe 20 feet or so. Flirting with the edge of the trail is the front wheel of my mountain bike — a wide Schwalbe Hans Dampf tire coated in mud. I’m on my brakes all the way but am making little progress in slowing down — the rotors are slick from the mud and I have little stopping authority. I’m leaning away from the edge to turn my bike back to the trail.
I’d love to have seen the look on my face.
What’s interesting about this mental picture is that it was taken on the third of five 9-mile laps. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but as I descended toward the turn, there it was. Some awareness of this event reached my amygdala which set off a very primitive alarm and sent a signal to my brain to actuate my muscles and steer me away from disaster. Instantly, I became the pilot of an airliner who wakes up in time to look into the eyes of a mountain goat.
During exertion or during stressful moments we tend to channelize our attention on a narrow set of things when several other things or people demand our attention. We may also, just as in the story above, move on autopilot. Our legs churn away on the pedals, but we’ve surrendered to fatigue — delivering only enough attention to keep ourselves on the trial.
The consequences of this can be disastrous whether it happens to us behind the wheel or directing our attention to an otherwise inconsequential detail of our business when more decisive aspects demand our attention. Ever hear the story about the Eastern Airlines crash? The crew became so fixated on a burned out landing gear light that they didn’t notice they had disengaged the autopilot and gradually crashed into the ground.
We make mistakes when we’re tired or stressed out. Under pressure, we’ll miss details and, owing to our brain’s consumption of mental bandwidth, we are less able to communicate what’s going on. Our movements become sloppy. Worse, we can find ourselves in a death spiral of self-sabotage, circling the drain until we plunge headlong into failure with a whimpering “fuck it” hissing from our mouths.
Good news, though: we can disrupt this phenomenon.
During the Anticipation stage we train for the event and mentally rehearse for what we will subject ourselves to. Identifying the symptoms of our suffering and knowing what we can expect during an event is essential. If we’re doing things right, we’ve forecasted roughly when our body’s performance erodes and when our minds become detached from the event. Perhaps we’re familiar with the signs of gnawing temptation that beckon us from whatever we’re abstaining from. We’ve heard over and over “It’s time to quit” in our heads during training and perhaps we’ve become better at countering it with a louder “Press On”.
Familiarity with the symptoms that accompany stress and fatigue are only part of the equation, though. The heart of acknowledgement is possessing the self-awareness recognize them as they occur and come to terms with them. This challenging task is where we awaken to our reality as if we’re raising our heads above the fog to see the physical and moral landscape for what it is. In doing so, we can better see our goals as being real and worthwhile. We can see past what is normally a temporary state and remind ourselves of the goodness we initially sought in our pursuit.
We can develop the self-awareness required to recognize the fog through meditation in addition to physical practice for the event itself. However, my contention is that the self-awareness we gather through meditation transfers to other parts of our lives whereas physical practice tends to be event-specific. For instance, through meditation I build a script for my mind to follow that goes something like: What am I feeling? What do I need? What do I want? And most importantly What can I control in this situation?
This works whether I’m stuck in traffic or somewhere deep in the woods on the bike for hours. I’ve found that with practice I was better able to find moments where I could make these assessments throughout the day. In doing so, asking these questions during stress and exertion became a function of routine.
Acknowledgement happens quickly but it does not only happen once during activity. It’s iterative, like a waitress coming to your table to see how your meal is or if you need more nachos. In spite of its relatively short duration, a lot happens: we have an opportunity to step out of the situation and study it. We can take note of the environment, the equipment, the people around us, and especially our own selves. This is not merely a passive activity of observation, it is ultimately an assessment of what we can control which is the foundation of all action that will follow.
