flow and impermanence
I have always had a curious mind .. pair that with finding a hobby like bodybuilding that has almost limitless potential as well as both stimulates and encourages critical thinking, trial and error, and applied learning… I’m sold!
I’m still so new to it, but it continues to teach me so much. Most recently I have been thinking about mental flexibility. It doesn’t just ask you to practice mental flexibility, but because being mentally flexible is so intrinsically rooted in the physical ebb and flow of what bodybuilding is, it provides you with this very powerful avenue of also understanding ebb and flow in life. When I think about what this means to me on a larger scale .. it’s understanding the truth that you CAN’T stay in one place forever, and why would you want to?
Life is this continuous evolution. One moment is here and it goes and the next. I think bodybuilding is such a nice and almost very simplistic way to understand the ever changing ever flowing and ever moving nature of life. That the sun goes up and down regardless- regardless of if you had the best day of your life or the worst. That in the grand scheme of things everything keeps moving .. your body, your mind, your surroundings, the environment. Everything is in a constant state of evolution.. and for better or worse nothing is permanent.
Bodybuilding continuously stimulates me to learn flow, to surrender to flow. Which is funny because you would think from an outside perspective it seems to be the opposite. But regardless, this is part of the reason I see so much of myself in this sport, and why it has felt almost magnetic and natural for me. I am a very spiritual person, and while I draw my knowledge from many places religiously .. Buddhism has become the keystone of my spiritual understanding. So much of Buddhism is about detachment, about learning to stop resisting and flow with the current .. to not fluctuate so wildly between extremes, but to curb the highs and uplift the lows. And that is why I find bodybuilding so fascinating, to find that something that from an outside perspective seems so stringent, so rigid, so “extreme” is actually all about the art of surrender.
It teaches you the simplicity of moving forward regardless. That nothing is permanent and no feeling is final. It’s quite beautiful. And because of that, I think through reflecting on this notion of impermanence we are able to understand that now is here and here is now- there is no tomorrow or yesterday, we are gifted the present moment and that is all. I think the profundity in this is that you are truly choosing who you are in every moment. Because we think we are this bigger egoic perception of ourselves, but actually I think who we are really are .. who I really am .. is the little ways I exist and live my life in my one tiny given moment. That’s quite profound, and quite lovely. We are who we choose to be in the moment we have.
.. and I guess that’s just the little approach I have right now. That even the smallest little decision to go just 1% beyond reach in the itty bitty moment I am given is enough to define that I am a growing person. that makes me happy.