ON THE NECESSARY DISRUPTION OF HARMONY

One of my favorite scenes in cinema comes from the “so-bizarre-it-HAS-to-exist” 90s film “The 5^th Element”, wherein criminally underrated (because no matter how many positive things you say about him it wouldn’t be enough) actor Gary Oldman, playing the part of Jean-Baptize Emanuel Zorg, pushes a glass off his table while having a conversation with a space-priest in order to demonstrate the benefits of chaos.  With “chaos being the plan”, you can understand already why I’m a fan of this scene.  But what unfolds is a symphony of robotics that come to the aid of the situation, one to clean the broken glass, one to replenish the drinker with a new glass, one to fill that new glass with a new beverage, etc.  The scene, of course, goes on to demonstrate the benefit of humanity in the face of all these robots, but that’s a dumb lesson, so instead I focus on what Zorg was trying to teach: how the disruption of a harmonious state is more than simply “not negative”, but, in fact, very much positive AND necessary in order for us to achieve higher levels of excellence and, ultimately, realize our maximal potential.

Seriously, just a fantastic movie and scene

This, of course, comes screaming in on the heels of my post recent posts wherein I have described the bliss that comes with eating, living and training in a manner that suits my internal nature, effectively aligning my actions with my instincts and achieving a truly “intuitive” state of existence.  That joy and bliss IS real, BUT, I also frequently speak to the reality of duality and dualistic forces in nature, and duality is ALSO key to achieving a harmonious state.  Balance is crucial to harmony, and imbalances create disharmony.  Too much virtue and not enough vice creates disharmony in the same way that too much vice and not enough virtue do.  The external outcomes may be different (an excessive sinner’s sins tend to impact society to a greater extent than an Ned Flanders type does), but, internally, the outcome is disharmony.  BUT, when we go into a macro level here, we are forced to understand a true bit of irony: there is DISHARMONY in having TOO MUCH HARMONY.

 

YES!  How incredibly comedic: if we exist in a state of harmony for TOO LONG, we become necessarily disharmonious due to the lack of disharmony to balance out the harmony!  In order to remain IN harmony, we must necessarily be regularly exposed to periods of disharmony.  I am genuinely laughing as I write that, because it’s the kind of cruel trick that only nature can play on us.  I wrote about how I spent far too long in a disharmonious state and how it was destroying me internally, but I was not existing in that state purely for the sake OF self-destruction: my intent was to have disharmony force my body and self to achieve some manner of adaptation in order to overcome the state OF disharmony.  Nietzsche’s “will to power” coming into play there: a catalyst must exist in order to drive adaptation and evolution.  Absence a threat from the environment, there’s no force to drive change within a species, but when something presents which disrupts harmony, change and adaptation occur.  This drives evolution, the realization of potential and, ultimately, self-actualization, which is a necessary part OF existing in a harmonious state.  Absent self-actualization, one experience ennui, which, in turn, is in itself a disharmonious state wherein the only escape is SUBJECTION TO DISHARMONY!  Oh my goodness it just doesn’t stop.

 

See what happens in the absence of challenges...and major props if you get this reference

Holy cow, how is this about training?  Let me try to get back to the micro-level here.  Training and nutrition, done correctly, are phasic by nature.  This is basic periodization at work.  In training, we have conditioning/GPP phases, accumulation phases, intensification phases, etc.  Our nutrition matches to align with these phases as a means of recovery support.  Phasically structured training is training with the intentional disruption of harmony effectively built INTO the plan.  We give an athlete just enough time to adapt to the training only to switch it up on them, generate a disharmonious state, have that state force adaptation, and have adaptation result in growth, and have that growth be part of the realization of potential.  Done correctly, this style of training and nutrition will ultimately have the athlete realize their MAXIMAL potential and, ultimately, achieve whatever greatness they have within them.  And, in turn, they realize harmony: but only by EXPERIENCING a necessary degree of the disruption of said harmony.  Had we never disrupted their harmony, they would have never achieved a true state of it, instead existing in a lesser state, which, in turn, results in the disharmony that comes with NOT realizing one’s true potential.

 

I was experiencing this first hand living intuitively these past few weeks.  My heart was full, my mind was clear, I was joyful…and I found myself growing soft.  I was gravitating to the things I was good at and avoiding the things I was bad at.  I noted that I had stopped training my abs and arms directly, and, in turn, I observed declines in their performance.  I found my body had gone flat because I was settled into a style of eating that brought me internal harmony, and that style included no carbohydrates whatsoever and was purely animal protein.  I was living in a state of harmony and bliss and, in turn, not making strides toward internal greatness…and, in turn, experiencing ennui at “this being it”.  So I ate a bunch of carbohydrates on a Sunday evening (but opted for “clean” sources vs my typical junk food Rampages) and woke up Monday to combine Jon Andersen’s Deep Water program and Dan John’s 10k swing challenge into 1 workout which I stretched into the full week, because I recognized that I grow at my best rates when I follow someone else’s programs, primarily because they will force me to do things I will not do for myself.  And it worked.  I started with 10x10 SSB squats with 50 swings between sets to get in 100 squats and 500 swings, and with that workout on Monday, my legs were sore until Friday.  I kept up my Viking motif through it all, because it’s been an excellent driver of decision making, and let this disharmonious state drive me toward adaptation.  And now that I’ve discovered this, I have an idea that, every few weeks, I can inject a “harmony disruptor” into my intuitive lifestyle in order to keep sharp.  This coincides very much with Jon Andersen’s “catfish” notion written about in Deep Water, alongside Dan John’s “Bus Bench” training and his 28 day fat loss attack strategy, and so many many other very smart authors out there that realized all this well before I did.

There's always this...

 

But, once again, the comedy here is that, by establishing a PLAN of harmony disruption, I create a plan that will, necessarily, NEED to be disrupted itself in order for me to continue to achieve greatness THROUGH the disruption of harmony.  Soon, it will become too predictable that I am disrupting my own harmony in order to achieve greatness, and it will become necessary to find a new way to do so that is not predictable or stable: something I myself cannot anticipate.  And perhaps that is something accomplished by NOT disrupting harmony: “the only winning move is not to play”, to quote Wargames.  However it unfolds, the lesson remains: an abundance of harmony without a necessary degree of disharmony is, in itself, disharmonious and will result in the dissonance that comes with experiencing disharmony. 

 

In order to BE harmonious, we MUST experience regularly bouts of disharmony.