I’M NOT DEAD YET

Taking a slight break from my typical 1 million mile perspective and super nihilism, let’s continue to acknowledge the reality that, yes, one day, we are all going to die…it hasn’t happened yet.  And that’s what I find fascinating about all of you, because I am constantly informed that I’m the weird one for how much I accept my mortality and speak to these tragic outcomes, yet, if one were to examine how we conduct ourselves, I find the casual observer would conclude YOU to be far more the nihilist that I am.  Why?  Because you seem to have accepted your death so much so to the point that you are living like a dead person.  And no, not like a CONDEMNED person, which is honestly freedom, but like an actual person that has already expired, because you are doing NOTHING.  In your pursuit of self-preservation, you have committed the most significant act of self-destruction, because you failed to live up to your potential.  Why do I train the way I train and live the way I live?  Because unlike you, I’m not dead YET.

This is the one live we get to live.  This is the one time we get to have youth on our side.  The tragedy of modern existence is that we get to spend a LOT of our life being old.  We get to spend a LOT of our life in decline.  The olden days circumvented this by means of tragedy; you either died in a war, or from disease, or famine, or some other circumstance that had you expire as a means of being OUT of your prime.  Your prime was the only thing that ensured your existence, and once decline set it, so began the doomsday clock, as eventually life’s challenges required one to be on top of their game, and the inability to do so spelled disaster.  But now, with modern medicine and technology and a far less arduous existence, you can safely anticipate a long life (though nothing is guaranteed), and, in turn, that you will spend a LONG amount of time effectively dying.  However, what this means is that your youth is even MORE precious than it was before, because it occupies such a small percentage of your life now that it’s existence is effectively non-existent.

So why spend this incredibly short amount of time living LIKE you’re already old and dying?  Why treat your body so preciously and fragile when it’s at the one point in your lifespan that you CAN take advantage of it?  When you know it’s going to bounce back, why not try to make that bounce as high as possible?  Look, I’m 33 now; I can already feel the difference in my recovery compared to when I was in my early 20s, and instead of lamenting that my recovery has slowed, I’m so grateful that I took full advantage of my recovery WHILE I could, and in turn, while I’m in my early 30s and my recovery is STILL better than it will ever be from this point on, I’m also taking advantage of that.  I will never get this opportunity again to abuse my body to this extent and be able to recover and grow stronger as a result, whereas I have my whole life to be gentle and ginger and ease into things.

Probably doing stuff like this

Because I’m not dead yet, but you folks walk around like living corpses.  Why spend 80 years living like an 80 year old when you can live like you’re 20 when you’re 20, 30 when you’re 30, etc.  And I surmise to know the reason why; because you haven’t experienced death.  Not small, controlled dosages of it at least.  You’ve never had a chance to die and be reborn, or perhaps to die and ascend to the afterlife.  In your constant pursuit of self-preservation, you deny yourself true salvation, existing in a perpetual purgatory.  At least Hell has good company, but where you reside is permanent dissatisfaction.  Where are these small deaths to be found?  In injury, crashing to physical rock bottom and having to crawl your way back out of Hell to your perfect form, and if you’re lucky MAYBE you have a guide like Virgil with you.  In defeat, defeat so crushing you question why you even tried in the first place.  In absolute, total and abject failure DESPITE your best efforts.  The kind of failure where you realize that you literally had zero chance of succeeding.  These small deaths are what allow you to build up a tolerance to death, to be able to live like you aren’t dead yet.  To not be a walking corpse.

I know I’m not dead yet because I keep getting to come back from the dead.  I’ve found myself lying down on the floor of my garage in between sets 7 and 8 of a 10 set workout seriously contemplating quitting all of my training and selling all of my equipment, only to get up when the timer went off and hitting another squat.  I’ve sat in a lawn chair with my foot propped up and way too much ice on my knee, slowly rotating my foot to find the limits of my ROM after blowing out my ACL and contemplating if it was all worth it.  I’ve had other hardships too, but I’m not alone, and compared to others mine are walks in the park I’m sure, but the point is, I’m willing to put myself out there to DIE so that I can know I’m not truly dead yet.  To know I can keep coming back and getting bigger, stronger, better.  How about you?  Are you dead, or are you not dead yet?