Venturing into nature as athletes helps us to develop a mindset for personal freedom that can dramatically change our lives.
I’m not referring to our relative freedoms to do whatever we want without being held back by external restraints (for example, in this society we have a tendency to focus first on the financial aspect, as we do with many things). Working on these relative freedoms by earning some money, becoming physically more capable, and freeing up some time is not wasted effort and is necessary in modern society. However, we should be strategic about our efforts so that we don’t get stuck forever in a loop of striving for what we don’t have, losing alignment with our values, or fighting an unwinnable fight against reality. This happens to a lot of us who fail to deeply examine their lives, and we probably all sometimes get caught in these ruts to some extent. Even the things we do or pursue in the quest for a perceived freedom can create a new set of chains. As someone who worked hard in school to maximize my perceived opportunities and who trained with great discipline in an effort to become “unstoppable” and competitively fast as an endurance athlete I cannot stress this point enough.
The most empowering type of freedom that we can train for, and where we can make dramatic strides, is mental freedom. This lives in our heads and is rooted in accepting reality (including the truth of who we are) and owning our response to it. We can drop the stories in our heads that leave us anxious or unsatisfied, things like caring about approval or yearning for things we don’t have. Our relationship to our emotions changes; emotions in a state of freedom are largely survival cues telling us what to focus on or what to let go of. We find our balance and our lessons quickly, make our decisions, and keep moving without drama or baggage. We are willing to accept whatever happens but it’s not out of apathy; instead, it’s a state of self-determination. Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who found purpose in his experience, is the purest example and best illustrator of this principle that I can think of, writing that the “last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
We can only guess how our distant ancestors thought but it seems likely that mental freedom is closer to our natural state. Studies of many modern day hunter-gatherer societies suggest that although it is less protected from nature, primitive life may be mentally freer. Hunter-gatherers appear to live almost exclusively in the present moment and respond to nature as it comes, so much so that they don’t imagine another future that they are trying to build and they scarcely have a notion of their own history because nothing fundamentally changes in their society. That kind of acceptance probably sounds boring to many of us. It’s also difficult to relate to because almost all of us would freak out at the discomfort we would feel in primitive life. However, there’s a lesson to be learned from the fact that hunter-gatherers aren’t striving to get out of their reality because they appear to feel fulfilled with it exactly as it is. If that fact is surprising, we should keep in mind that their lives don’t actually resemble the torturous starvation we witness on Discovery Channel’s primitive survival show “Naked and Afraid.” True hunter-gatherers tend to have healthy high calorie diets and actually don’t work as hard as we do. Boredom might be more of a modern experience based on unsatisfied desires and expectations that we hold and a lack of appreciation for what reality offers. Also, for those of us who venture into nature, boredom is usually the last thing we feel.
Freedom is a state of mind that’s really difficult to find in a modern world that’s constantly striving to change reality and that has lost its connection to nature. When so many of us feel like we are in a rat race, when we fear and resist aging and dying, when anxiety, depression, and addiction are at epidemic proportions, and when our civilization seems like it might be on the verge of environmental collapse, we may want to learn a few lessons about freedom from nature and our ancestors. Fortunately for most of us, that doesn’t need to involve living in caves and rubbing sticks together (unless that happens to be our thing). Freedom is similar to the overall state of mind of an athlete in the moment, so we can start by training as athletes.
Athletic activities simulate ancestral experience in some powerful ways. The human mind did not evolve to be removed from its natural environment and focused on artificial concepts. When we participate in nature as athletes we are fully stimulated from a mental and physical perspective and our attention is directed at our natural environment and our bodies. We can remove ourselves from thoughts in our minds, baggage from the past, and worries about the future. As we step away from these thoughts we gain greater ability to change our perspective on them. As athletes, we take ownership of our limitations and our training. We give things our best shot and we balance our minds in all challenges. We learn to appreciate the rapidly changing forces of nature and to quickly respond to whatever nature or our athletic experiences throw at us. Over time, these things become increasingly intuitive and effortless.
As we gain athletic experience we develop strong mental tools for finding greater personal freedom in our lives. As we confront challenges in our careers, relationships, health, and other aspects of our lives these tools often kick in to help guide us to balance and effective responses. At times our lives may even feel like we are surfing a wave or flowing down some singletrack on a mountain bike. Learning to harness our athletic toolsets to find our mental freedom doesn’t always come intuitively and it can help to get some coaching and guidance with this process. Focusing on this pays off; after we have overcome athletic challenges, we have powerful tools and we should use them.
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