A Guide to Suffering: Anticipation
Programming the Machine
Anticipation requires its student to surrender pretension and hubris…
Suffering is instructive. That’s the mantra. No matter what you endeavor, if it’s a departure from your script you can guarantee that discomfort and perhaps some tough times await. All of that falls under the aegis of suffering.
You suffer when you run fast or far. You suffer when you’re laid up in a hospital bed recovering from surgery or an accident. You suffer when you break the icy grip of a bad habit. You suffer when you lose things and people who are close to you. Some suffering is all-consuming and can block out all other sensory inputs; some suffering is annoying like a paper cut. Regardless of the source or volume, we can learn from it.
The philosophy behind Suffer Lab is that we can deliberately create situations in our lives that challenge us and, in so doing, force ourselves into situations where we can either grow up or give up. By jostling our spirits with episodic, low-end suffering we become what Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes as Anti-fragile. We become less prone to physical, moral and spiritual injury and in the transformation we can also learn to emotionally detach ourselves from obstacles and see them for what they are.
We can reluctantly accept failure to achieve our goals because the process is where the true growth and transformation takes place. Ask any reformed smoker how many times it took them to quit before they kicked the habit. Just as much, we can be successful in reaching our goals, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the rocky path we struggled along to make it. You may not have noticed, but that’s where the real changes happened.
Developmental suffering is part of a growth process when it’s deliberate. In the series I’ve entitled “A Guide to Suffering” I’ll present the four walls that make up a Suffer Lab: Anticipation, Acknowledgement, Action, and Assessment. Yeah they all start with A’s, wanna fight about it? But they also share another common element — they place the cerebral ahead of the physical and the tangible. To borrow from Gym Jones: The mind is primary.
We begin with anticipation.
Where the meditative aspect of anticipation aids in developing a hypothesis for how we’ll respond to stress, meaningful physical practice refines our assumptions leading up to the event.
Anticipation is more than passing acknowledgement that you’re going to depart your comfort zone — this is arguably the most important phase. We can barter away a great deal of the fear, tension, or anxiety we may feel prior to and during an event by living it several times over in our minds. We can mentally brace for the hunger, thirst, and other deprivations experienced during prolonged exertion.
This is more than just planning. Anticipation involves mentally assembling all the actions within your plan, stepping in and out of them, playing the event in your head and making note of where all this will send your mind and body. You’ll miss a few things and there’s things you just can’t anticipate. This is what is referred to as “friction” in warfare.
Anticipation requires its student to surrender pretension and hubris. You’re not Superman and you have limits. Spend some time meditating on your weakness (trust me, it’s there) and you’ll be that much better prepared for your event and damn if you won’t learn a thing or two about yourself in the process.
Consider the use of imagery in this phase. Place yourself at mile 45 when you’re hungry and you just want to stop. Place yourself in the pre-dawn when you haven’t had a chance to sleep in 18 hours. Put yourself at your desk staring down the exam booklet waiting for the professor to say “begin”. What will you be wearing during the job interview? How will you walk from your car to the race registration tent? Imagine the smells and the temperature. What will you be hearing? Get good at this and do it often.
Use of mental imagery in this way is common among athletes, acrobatic pilots, race car drivers, and several other professionals to prepare for activity. Even going back to the Samurai days of medieval Japan where these men sought honor in dying for their master, imagery played a central role:
The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords. Being carried away by surging waves. Being thrown into the midst of a great fire. Being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake. Falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease, or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.
— Tsunetomo Yamamoto, from “Hagakure”
Pretty moto right? This is a little more terminal than we seek to explore in our own Suffer Lab but Tsunetomo’s point was clear: if I meditate on my death — if I live through a thousand of them — then meeting my ultimate purpose in real life is easier to digest.
Anticipation biases the cognitive side of things, but there’s something to be said about good old fashioned practice. Where the meditative aspect of anticipation aids in developing a hypothesis for how we’ll respond to stress, meaningful physical practice refines our assumptions leading up to the event. Special Operators will typically do rehearsals and dry runs before a complicated mission. Soccer players scrimmage. Cyclists log miles in the saddle. Students take practice quizzes.
In physical practice we also build muscle memory. Cops and soldiers practice drawing and firing their weapon over and over so that when the moment of truth finds them, their minds have one less thing hogging cerebral bandwidth. Okayyy pull out the gun…point it in the direction of the dangerous stuff…look down this sight on the front…aaaandddd I’m squeezing the trigger….shit that’s loud! There’s no time for that.
In deliberate suffering we are putting minds and bodies through stress in order to come out stronger and sharper on the other side. Some of these situations involve risk of injury in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment (ever watch the start of a bike race?). Anticipation — mental and physical examination and practice before the event — has an effect not unlike programming a computer. It prepares our minds to efficiently route needed physical and moral responses during stress and in doing so we negotiate away some of the tunnel vision and time-dilation (known as “tachypsychia” in the psychology world) that we experience during stressful situations.
Anticipation frees up head space to exercise self-awareness which is a key component of the second phase: Acknowledgement.
