Time Is On Your Side

One of the biggest difference makers, is whether one believes time is on one's side or against them: If the game is long enough, one could still conceivably, improve and win -- no matter what the score is, and how far behind one is.  If the game never ends, then one has not lost -- but has all the time in the world to get better.  If one lives that way their entire life, then there is no losing, or winning definitively for that matter, but simply working on one's game -- always improving.

But some get to the point in life, when they think there can be no improvement -- but only deterioration, decline, decay and ultimately death -- and they frequently live many of their years preparing for that eventuality.  But if one lives that way, then one will have wasted all the years they could have been fulfilling their lives instead of waiting for the end -- and worse.

The usual conditioning is to instill in us that we are always working against time -- rather than that we are working with time, just as people often think that the function of muscles is to oppose, or work against one another -- rather than to work collaboratively, for its greatest effect, and effectiveness.  That is similar to the thinking that one muscle works in isolation to every other -- including the heart, or the brain -- when in fact, they work best, if at all, together.  

One therefore, would never want to condition oneself, to merely cancel out their own efforts by deliberately making any effort any harder than it has to be.  The useful conditioning strategy, is always to make things as easy as possible, and in that way, many more things become possible, so more can be accomplished.  Otherwise, one is stuck merely doing and undoing -- and never moving ahead, never moving on, but merely repeating the same old things unsuccessfully, until one is tired of continuing in that way.

That sounds like a lot of people's conditioning programs -- and so they are excited to start a new one, every six weeks -- that promises to undo everything that they didn't like doing, found objectionable, and caused their worse condition than they began with -- and so they are recovering, until they realize they can't anymore, and prepare just to get worse -- and not that they can ever get better again.

When one thinks time is against one, then one tries to overcome it by doing it as quickly and fast as possible -- which may increase the difficulty to impossible.  But if one has all one's life to accomplish that task, then it simply takes as long as it takes -- and it doesn't matter how quickly, or fast one accomplishes that, because that doesn't matter, only that one did, or was just about to.

How we live our lives, is very much like our conditioning strategy -- because that in effect, is what we are conditioning ourselves ultimately for -- to live our lives, and not sacrifice it, for the trophy or moment of glory and triumph, and then wither away the rest/most of our lives, as many young athletes think to do. But those days are very short -- in a long life, and most of it still to be lived, because the fullness is each moment -- and every subsequent moment being the summation of all the previous ones. 

It doesn't matter that one holds on to all the old memories and thoughts -- because the new subsumes the old, and is not just the accumulation of the old.  The problem of this loss of memories, is the letting go and clearing of the memory banks, in order to create space for the new -- is necessary, and a proper function in the vital, healthy person.

The enemy of the old, is not the young -- but the new.  That can be embraced by both the old and the young, or rejected by either as well -- but we only think that the young person doing so is a tragedy, while the old person doing so, can't help themselves -- that's just the way they are.  But never having to learn anything more new, for half one's life, or all of it, is the great tragedy of human existence.