Following our inspirations as outdoor athletes can help us transform into the people we are meant to be. In addition, maintaining athletic identities throughout our lives helps us cultivate the discipline and training mindset to tackle any obstacle in life.
From a personal development perspective it can be easy to get stuck in our frenzied modern lives. Our educational institutions tend to train us to be specialized, knowledgeable, sedentary and potentially well paid professionals but they don’t really focus much attention on developing us as people. Many pressures pull us away from our deepest inspirations and thereby hinder our ability to realize our full potential. We often find ourselves juggling just to stay afloat. When it comes to learning and development, we are bombarded with things to learn that can make us more effective in our careers or that we simply find enjoyable or interesting. However, simply gaining knowledge and skills is not enough to continue to grow into the people we want to be. If we want to change our lives it makes sense to focus some attention on building appropriate disciplines and transforming ourselves.
For those of us who enjoy participating as athletes in nature, it can be a path to connect us with ourselves and provide us with powerful opportunities for transformation. We seem to understand that athletic activities help kids develop character and that lifelong exercise is important for our physical and mental well-being, but our culture can do a much better job of encouraging and capturing the developmental power of athletic activity. Unfortunately, most of us stop truly developing ourselves as athletes after we finish high school and we shift our physical attention to “fitness.” Fitness and athletic training are pretty different things. One strives to maintain basic physical function, health and attractiveness while the other develops us for progressively harder challenges and springboards us into nature in more powerful ways. In many ways, a valuable pathway to human growth is often ignored due to cultural norms focusing our attention on becoming greater economic units and consumers. However, the power of choice is in our hands and our primal truth is that we evolved to be great outdoor athletes until our last breath. Even as our peak power potential declines a bit with age, our ability to continue to develop and explore as athletes need never cease.
Our athletic challenges can prepare and develop us for other challenges and obstacles in our lives. There are countless examples of this, and I can provide a few examples of how my own athletic endeavors after high school are helping me in life. Years of hurling myself into wind and waves as a kitesurfer have helped me become more comfortable acting in an environment of fear. Without these experiences I probably would have stayed far too obedient, risk averse, and approval-seeking to ever start any venture of my own. Repeatedly encountering similar competitive fixations and training compulsions as an athlete has forced me to look in the mirror to better understand my own personal pitfalls so that I can learn to manage them better. Many challenging nights pedaling my bike alone in the dark helped me find the confidence to focus on my own game plan in the face of uncertainty. Those nights also showed me that however far I can manage to cast my light, the soft stars add as much beauty to the night sky as the bright stars. As an athlete I feel that I have been able to forge a relationship with the part of me that will take risks to fully follow my greatest inspirations without regret. So long as we feel inspired, we can all craft suitable athletic challenges that we can use to train and prepare for obstacles and fears that stand in the way of living the lives that we are meant to live.
It can be brutally hard to push our own limits as outdoor athletes but it’s also a lot of fun. No path of transformation is easy. One way or another, it’s unavoidable to face discomfort, suffering, and fear as we move towards our fullest lives. Fullness is largely a function of finding equanimity in all challenges. We each have our own ways to connect with ourselves and develop, and the best areas in life to cultivate our discipline and mindset are found in our inspiration. Personal growth doesn’t have to primarily involve sitting quietly on pillows or reading books if that does not suit our temperaments. Some solitude and quiet reflection are essential and natural, but our path to transformation can generally also be as hard-charging and filled with adrenaline, adventure, and laughter as suits us.
Hi David, the premise is that survival was inherently an athletic endeavor for most of the history of our species. We evolved from nomadic hunter gatherers. In that context immobility leads to death. I would expect the level of physical activity for elders in a primitive community to be a bit less than that of youths but probably not very substantially. However, I haven't really researched that point extensively. I am sure that we can find certain indigenous cultures in resource rich environments that can support and sustain elders to greater degrees of physical decline but it doesn't make sense that nomadic groups in precarious environments can sustain people who are a burden to survival of the group. Our m…
I resonate with your message. I particularly find inspiration in how being an athlete has helped you to “forge a relationship with the part of me that will take risks to fully follow my greatest inspirations without regret”. Lets all do more of that!
Thanks for the message, Jochem! I wonder where the message "we evolved to be great outdoor athletes until our last breath" came from? It sounds true, but can you share more of what you mean by that? Keep it coming, brother.