My Favorite Life Skill

Knowing the time

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

I had a friend in high school named Bobby. Bobby lived with his dad, and Bobby’s dad was a rock solid guy. He could be counted on. He did what he said and said what he meant. And he passed that same integrity down to Bobby. Bobby was a good guy.

Now of course as teenagers we broke things and stole things and hurt people. Because that’s what teenagers are like. Or at least that’s what we were like. But beyond that, Bobby was a solid guy just like his father.

Bobby and his dad were old school, and I admired that. They got things done, and people respected them and their work. They were sturdy. Their entire attitude towards life could be summed up in four words:

Work now, play later.

They worked hard. Very hard. Bobby built a lawn mowing business with dozens of customers by the time he was 17, and he continued running that business long after high school.

And when they played, they played hard. If Bobby wanted to go out drinking, he went. And he drank hard, and he enjoyed the piss right out of himself. But the next day, he woke up and went to work in the heat and the sun and worked a full day. No matter what state his liver or his intestines were in. Because it was time to work, and that was the only motivation he needed.

We all had to work shifts hung over as teenagers and young adults. That’s not that special. But what struck me about Bobby and his dad was that they never complained. Ever. When it was time to do a thing, they did it. Gracefully. And even if not gracefully, willingly.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve adopted a similar mindset. Maybe I partially got this from Bobby and his dad, as well as from my own parents and step-parents.

You will almost never hear me complain. About anything. I don’t want a pat on the back for that, I just think complaining is a total waste of time. Like guilt or regret. I just find that these particular behaviors fit very nicely in the trash can.

I recently started working out with a personal trainer. There are things about it I like, and there are things about it I dislike. Same as anybody else. But I don’t really think in terms of liking it or not liking it. I just do it because it needs done. It’s part of my routine now, and I don’t think about it beyond that. I show up, I put in the work, and I leave.

So now I spend a few hours a week at the gymnasium. I’ve noticed something about all the people with the best results — and it’s something I’ve seen in all other areas of life. The people with the best results always display a love of the process. And that includes the pain. And it includes the inconvenience. And it includes the soreness and the fatigue and, occasionally, the total exhaustion of leaving it all on the gym floor.

The first time I worked out with my trainer, I exerted myself so hard that I almost cried. I haven’t cried in, like, 12 years. I was on the verge of a panic attack. So that was new for me — I hadn’t physically exerted myself since I was in school. But it didn’t bother me, because I expected to exert myself that hard. That’s what I signed up for.

All of these things are inherently part of serious training. You came to the gym to feel pain. Because that’s where the muscle growth comes from: the pain. It comes directly and exclusively from doing something you don’t want to do.

How much growth you get is directly proportional to how much you're willing to make it suck.

Which means, if you work out, you ought to enjoy the pain in your muscles. You ought to enjoy reaching the point of failure, where you physically cannot do another rep. That’s rewarding to me, not because I’m a masochist but because it means I’m doing the process part correctly. Which means I can expect the succulent results. And I’m already seeing them.

There’s even pleasure to be found in the sacrifice that it takes, for example, to nurture a relationship. Nobody wants to drive 3 hours to get their husband’s or wife’s favorite thing from that cute little store in the middle of nowhere. But you can enjoy that car ride knowing this is what it feels like to care for someone. This is what it feels like to sacrifice. There’s pleasure in that, if you ask for it.

Life is about accepting sensations. An activity is yours to participate in, and you accept all the sensations and feelings that come along with it. Willingly. Gracefully, even. And sometimes that includes pain and toil and hurt. Because sometimes that’s what time it is, and there’s nothing you can do but either embrace it or hate it.

But it also includes things that are actually supposed to be pleasurable. There’s such a thing as being good at relaxing, or bad. When it’s time to relax after work, you don’t just sit in any old place that happens to be in your own house and then keep running all the shitty mental subroutines you've been running at work all day — worrying about clients and thinking about how much you hate your boss. No no. You change into extremely comfortable clothes, you find your favorite spot in the house, and you enjoy yourself. You relax as fuck. Or at least you should. You wipe off your day as one wipes off makeup, and then you sink into relaxation like a feather bed.

Because it’s time to relax.

The way to get through your working days isn’t to “grit your teeth and bear it.” Unless you’re doing something mercilessly difficult. You can’t white-knuckle your whole life. That’s a great way to die early and inflict chronic emotional pain on yourself that wasn’t necessary in the first place.

I’ve always been suspicious of people who claim that grinding 16 hours a day is a good thing. I’ve always insisted upon having down time every day. I guess I learned early on that recovery is part of work. You hear this from fitness experts, but you also hear it from happy people generally: recovery isn’t the avoidance of work, it’s part of the work. It’s how you collect yourself; it’s how you regain the momentum to work hard again tomorrow. So if you don’t learn how to rest properly, you’re not getting your best results anyway. You’re just beating your head against a brick wall for diminishing returns.

So when it’s time to rest, you better make damn sure you’re resting in a way that’s good for you. Resting is not sitting around complaining about having to work tomorrow. And resting is not continuing to do all the things that stressed you out to begin with. Resting is resting.

Unhappy people have something in common with each other: they never seem to want to be doing whatever they’re doing right now. Whether that’s work, or studying, or talking, or even relaxing or playing a game. Everything fucking bores them.

So what’s the problem? Well, I can tell you what the problem isn’t. The problem isn’t that happy people just happen to have interesting shit to do all the time.

Your memory of a thing will only be as good or bad as you let it be. If you spend your whole life resisting what’s in front of you, you’ll have nothing but half-assed memories of things you were never really even present for. And that includes work. A person ought to know what it feels like to work with their whole ass, and to be thinking of nothing else. Because that’s a rich experience; it’s difficult, but if you get through the “fuck this” phase, you actually arrive at a place that feels light and freeing.

Until it’s time to play. And then, if you’re being serious about play, again it should feel light and freeing. If you’re serious about play, it should feel like you have become a child again and your imagination is in charge.

When it’s time to grieve, you grieve. If anybody tries to stand in the way of that, harm them. The time to grieve is not forever, but perhaps it is right now. And that’s okay. And then when it’s no longer time to grieve, you stop and you do something else.

When you have money in the stock market and the market goes down, you might say to yourself, “Well, it's time to lose money for a while.” And this, too, shall pass.

When it’s time to stand outside and be cold at the bus stop, fine. It’s time to be cold. And soon it’ll be time to be warm.

I heard a story somewhere on the internet. A father had his baby on an airplane or a bus. A crowded place with lots of people. The baby began crying. The father, either out of exhaustion or out of wisdom, simply said to his boy, “It’s not time for that right now.” And the baby stopped crying immediately.

Maybe this child was especially wise. Maybe his sympathetic emotional system developed very early. Or maybe he simply heard his father’s tone of voice and understood the message even at his young age. The tone, even without words, said that it wasn’t time to cry. It just wasn’t.

Surely we won’t all be so lucky with our own kids. But there’s a lot to be said about that tone and that message.

That’s the same tone I take with myself, all the time. I don’t berate myself, and yet I don’t give myself syrupy encouragement and flowery affirmations. Because I don’t find any of that particularly useful, and it usually just makes me cringe. I merely accept what time it is and what time it isn’t, and all of the sensations and feelings that come along with what’s in front of me. That’s my favorite life skill.

Drink some water because it’s time to.

JR

“When I grow up I want to be a little boy.” - Joseph Heller