“I'm holding on too tight. I've lost the edge. I'm sorry, sir.”
- Cougar, Top Gun (1986)
In our modern lives, we appear more prone than ever to get stuck in endless chases and clinging to many things and ideas. This is not the way of nature and it contributes to weakness, vulnerability, and unhappiness. When we spend time truly observing nature we see a constant movement of energy and transformation. We can work on closing the gap with nature as we become stronger and more aligned with our ever evolving selves.
It appears that much of our weakness today is traceable to certain things that we hold onto. As the inhabitants of the wealthiest country on Earth, this of course includes hundreds of comforts and privileges that may impair discipline and challenge on the path to strength. It includes many distractions, dysfunctional habits, fears and defensive lies that keep us from developing ourselves. It includes false masks that keep us from even showing up in a real way. It also includes things we constantly chase in an attempt to find happiness, love, or feelings of self-worth. As we discover time and time again, accumulating these things we chase never seems to have lasting effect. In all of these areas, the most direct route to true strength generally centers around letting go.
Of course, we are terrible at letting go. After all, we became the richest country in the world by accumulating and controlling, not by letting go. In some ways, now we are generally dealing with the downside of this strategy. Luckily, nature helps us quite naturally let go of the energies that keep us stuck and the things that we don’t truly value so that we end up more aligned with ourselves. This will help us grow stronger and more focused in going after what inspires us and what we truly value.
Here are some practical suggestions about working with nature to facilitate this process:
Move from random exercise to a true training discipline. The distinction is that true training requires humility, patience, and an acceptance of our own individual reality. As we train our strengths, we work on spotting our weaknesses in training and focusing our efforts on those. We are grateful when we find weak links in our chain because they often hold the keys to progressing. Similarly, letting go generally forces us to accept difficult realities about parts of ourselves or things in our lives that hold us back. When we truly train rather than randomly work out, we are developing a skill set that helps us deal with the difficult realities involved in letting go more generally in our lives.
Take a few outside movement breaks every day. Start doing a walking, running or bike commute if you can. Moving our bodies outside seems to free up stuck energy in our heads. When we do this we tend to think better, perform better at work, and find ourselves less agitated by “problems.” I used to do a particularly long bike commute to work and I noticed that when I did this the solutions to the situations that most challenged or bothered me usually emerged while I was on my bike. In life we are just responding to shifting energies in our environment and it appears that when we let our physical energy flow a bit the other energies flow effectively as well.
Challenge yourself outside in nature the next weekend that you have the opportunity. Pick something new that you haven’t done before, where challenge and inspiration are generally equally matched. When we get into nature in this way, we start to naturally let go of things that don’t truly matter in our hearts. In many ways the shifting energies of nature just perform much of the work for us and we may not always be aware of what's going on. What matters more than outcomes and quantifiable metrics is commitment to challenge and deep immersion in nature. We give challenges a full effort at an appropriate pace for us while continuing to make prudent decisions. Perhaps we meet an objective for the day and perhaps we don’t. The reality of our ability level and whatever nature throws at us that day will determine that. In the long run, it doesn’t really matter. As we become more consistent in doing this and in training our bodies progressively over the course of months and years, our “success” rates go up, the difficulty of our challenges increases, our physical capabilities continue to gradually improve, and the obstacles we can let go of in our lives become substantially bigger.
Embrace the opportunities that changing weather gives you to redirect your inner energy. We live in constant interaction with the natural forces around us, and our outer and inner environments seem very closely related. Storms can sometimes help us get unstuck and cleanse our heads of dysfunctional thinking. When it rains, it may be helpful to go running and envision the rain washing away inner blockages. Fresh snow is an opportunity to make fresh tracks rather than follow old patterns. In my experience, there are few natural forces that can clear our heads and feed our spirits like the wind. I’ve had plenty of mental baggage just blow away for good in strong winds. I don’t have any scientific journals to prove how any of this could work and I have no intent to try to build an evidence-based case about this. There’s no question that weather affects us significantly. It might be a complete placebo effect, but I find confronting changing weather with this mindset to be helpful in maintaining movement and flow in my life.
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