I'm embarking on one of my favourite pastimes - travel for a 'thing'. I'm on my way (via the UK and France) to Sweden to compete in the World Masters Athletics Championships. My 'Worlds trip' is the highlight of my year, my big fun.
They don't start for another 3 weeks but I don't have a track to train on at home (it's closed for repair) so I'm going early to get in a bit of proper training.
Two weeks ago I seriously considered cancelling the whole trip. For the past six months I've been walking a tightrope to get ready after a foot injury last December. I had no time to spare, but I'd managed my way through the minefield that is a hurried preparation for comp, and was starting to see some progress.
Then two weeks ago, because of the hurried training schedule, my sciatic nerve started getting grumpy. When that happens I can't put power into the ground when I sprint. That means I can't sprint fast.
So I had a week of warming up, trying to do my session, then packing up and going home, each time, my heart sinking a little further.
Because I didn't have any time to spare, each time this happened, it was like I heard a clock ticking in the background, telling me I was further and further away from being ready to compete; that my Worlds trip was becoming uncertain.
It's been15 months since my last trip and I'm so ready for an adventure! The idea of not going made me feel dead inside.
This sparked my curiosity. I consider curiosity to be one of the essential attitudes for personal growth. As I've noted previously, we don't often have any say in what thoughts and feelings arise, but it's what we do with them that forms the path of growth.
I wondered to myself: is this desire to go on my Worlds trip a healthy desire, or is it what Buddhists would call craving? I call it hungering (the Pali word literally means thirst but I think hunger is something we can relate to more easily as we feel it every day).
My rule of thumb for figuring out which is present is this: If I can't have it, do I get reactive?
A healthy relationship to pleasure of any kind can involve looking forward to it, and relishing it when it comes. If it doesn't end up coming, there can be disappointment but it passes and I move on. If there's hungering present, I have trouble letting it go - mental movies of the if only variety start up in my mental cinema - reactivity arises.
Reactivity is that fast, automatic emotional response: I HAVE to have this; or I MUSTN’T have this.Â
The Buddha observed that when we encounter difficult spaces in life (dukkha in Pali), reactivity arises and the practical challenge he offered was to dismantle it. He described difficult spaces as:
1.     Birth
2.     Sickness
3.     Old age
4.     Death
5.     Being parted from things we love
6.     Not getting what we want
7.     Getting what we don’t want
8.     Our whole psycho-physical condition
(By the way the last point on that list is responsible for the common misrepresentation of the Buddha’s teaching as life is suffering.)
As I started to accept the possibility that I might pull the pin on my trip, the words not getting what we want arose.
As I pondered the healthiness or otherwise of my relationship to this pleasure, I tested a few scenarios in my imagination. What if I still went on the trip but didn’t compete? What if I competed knowing that I would perform well below my best?
Both of these imaginings immediately drained much of the reactivity….the I gotta have this, desperate quality.
The ego hopped up and down for a few minutes, protesting at underperforming in a setting where I’m known to be a medal contender, imagining people watching and feeling underwhelmed by what I do. But I’m well practised at turfing my ego out of the driver’s seat of my life and it didn’t take long to achieve that.
So what was triggering the reactivity? It clearly wasn’t the desire for winning.
The answer came to me as I imagined cancelling the trip and staying at home. THAT imagining is what I was balking at - it was aversion. In fact the words that came up were: I’d feel dead inside.
Kind of extreme huh? That caught my attention!
I love my home, and I love my life, so why was this triggering reactivity? The answer was very clear to me. My need for variety, for novelty, for fun. In my model of the Nine Elements of Human Flourishing, it’s the first one on the vase – pleasure (which, in the model includes sensory pleasures AND mind pleasures).
Us humans are adaptation machines. It’s part of the brilliance of how we’re put together, how we cope with the changing dynamic environment that is our world. As part of this, we’re built to stop noticing the familiar, even if that familiar is pleasant.
My life is great, but it’s so darned familiar!!! I’ve been living in the same house for 20 years, married to the same man for 23 years, I’ve been doing athletics for 13 years and running my business for 17 years.
Now some people like everything being familiar and predictable (the quick way to Alzheimer’s disease by the way). But in my body-mind it’s like something inside me just goes to sleep. I still enjoy my day to day, but there’s something about brushing up against the world, against the unfamiliar, the unknown, that wakes me up, that makes me feel alive.
I noticed this sensation as I was walking past the departure gates at Hong Kong airport where I changed planes. Each door seemed to me the entrance to a new experience, a new adventure, different kinds of lives - homes, languages, customs, foods, expectations and hopes for life. I love walking down these corridors! Tokyo Gate 62 on the right, a Chinese city I’ve never heard of, Gate 63 on the left, Frankfurt to the right, Jakarta to the left, London to the right, Sydney to the left…ooh, no…there’s a pang of that dead feeling!
So then I thought about the research on Buddhist monks that shows they don’t habituate to things like most of us. Psychologists study the startle response when they want to know whether people are attending to stimuli or ignoring it. If we are attending to it, like we do when we’re presented with something new, there are certain physiological and neurological indicators. These monks show the startle response to familiar stimuli more than the rest of us.
Perhaps that’s the result of cultivating beginner’s mind – the practice of meeting each moment as it presents itself (at least to the extent that’s possible) rather than pre-filtered through our own expectations, assumptions or goals.
So….my go-to questions for exploration: what is this? What’s going on here?
Reactivity is arising with the prospect of under-stimulation.
I remember noticing this phenomenon knocking on the door during the COVID-19 lock-downs. There was no choice then – I accepted it and just lived on through it. I did that pretty equanimously to be fair, so I know I can be with under-stimulation and it doesn’t undo me. (Although if I imagine the idea of having to do that again, I do notice a little reactivity arises.)
I realised the answer lies in personality and character structure. And here opens a door to some deep personal work.
….to be continued next week.
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