Tag Archives: Anxiety

Giving Away Your Strength

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Strength has become my passion and a fundamental part of my business. My goal in life is to be as strong as possible. My goal in business is to get my clients as strong as they possibly can.

With strength, an individual can sail into their senior years confident they can perform everyday tasks needed to both survive and thrive. Greater strength reduces the risk of falls and accidents. It reduces the risk of age-related diseases such as osteoporosis, sarcopenia, heart disease, and diabetes. Imagine looking and feeling younger than your actual age. Imagine running around with your grandchildren and not having to worry whether you can keep up. With a foundation of strength, this is a possibility.

Once you have strength, you will do everything in your power to keep it. You make better nutritional decisions, have better sleep hygiene, improve stress management, and in general, you become more active. Lean muscle tissue is metabolically expensive. The last thing you want to do with that hard-won strength is give it away.

I do everything within my power to protect and build my strength. Maintaining bodily strength is not that difficult. The major requirement is to do the work.

There is more to strength than the physical. And while I won’t readily give away the physical, I have recently started giving away the mental. Lately, I have been floundering in a raging sea of:

  • Current world events,
  • Current local events,
  • Past events, and
  • Future possible events.

So much is going on in the world, and I have been trying desperately to make sense of it all. There once was a time when life was slower. The news came a day, week, or a month later. Communication was through letters or maybe a phone call. A person’s focus was on doing the tasks of the day that would ensure food, clothing, and shelter was available to family and loved ones. People did what they had to do to survive and spent little time worrying about everything else.

Maybe I am not alone in this. Maybe I am not the only one struggling to stay as strong mentally as I am physically. The temptation is to shut it all down. If the sky is falling and the world is going to pieces, who am I to stop it? And that may be my greatest question because I can’t stop it. I do not have the power to stop a financial crisis, a plague, or an asteroid from hitting the earth. I can prepare for the worst and hope for the best, but things outside of my control will remain outside of my control.

You have power over your mind not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Marcus Aurelius

Committing mental energy to things outside of my sphere of influence is a poor investment and an expensive waste of time. Even worse, I am giving away my strength and no longer serving others. How am I living my purpose on this earth by focusing on that which is out of my control? I am not, and therefore, I must get stronger and put my focus where it belongs.

It Never Happened

Photo by Luiz Rogério Nunes on Unsplash

The conversation was inevitable. Tensions were high and coming to a head. The current path was no longer conducive for both of us to walk.

As with most everything else I do in my life, I visualize the way I think it will go down. Will I be able to keep my emotions in check? Can I stay calm? And if it comes to blows… Okay, maybe that is a little far, but one must be prepared, right?

Visualization turns to obsession. Obsession becomes neuroticism. Blood pressure rises in anticipation. Anticipation results in a loss of productivity, and then later, in a loss of sleep. And like many conversations I have imagined in the past, this one never happened.

I am an old man and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain

The fantasy I have created in my mind results in a reality of needless suffering. Anxiety for an unknown future is silly. Just like the good times, I have found a way to survive the bad times. Usually, I came out fine, maybe even a little stronger. Did I need to suffer in advance? Did the suffering change the event looming on the horizon? Did the event even happen? The answer is obvious and yet, I continue the same preposterous ritual of premature suffering.

The future has not arrived. I can prepare for the future by building my anxiety, running through countless possible scenarios, and then exacerbating the threat by giving it more attention than it deserves. Or I can prepare by doing the work required of me in the present moment. The activities of today demand my attention. The victories in the here and now are the stepping-stones that will see me through tomorrow. I cannot cross the bridge of the unknown until I arrive at the threshold.

He suffers more than is necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.

Seneca, Letter #98: On the Fickleness of Fortune

Twain and Seneca provide the proof that I am not the only one anxious about future events. There may even be a chance that we are in the same predicament. If so, then I implore you to turn to the present and let the events of tomorrow rest until they become the events of today. Prepare for tomorrow by attending to the work required of you today.

Bound by Anxiety

I was living a nightmare. It was a bad rendition of George Thorogood’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.” I was in my late 20’s. I had a decent job. But with all the debt I racked up from the Army, I was struggling to get by. Every cent I earned hardly covered my living expenses. It certainly was not enough to get ahead. I was miserable and saw no light at the end of the tunnel. Instead of buckling down and proactively doing something about my situation, I took what little money I had, bought some booze, and did my best to check out from reality.

I wanted to get better, yet I didn’t know how. I was stuck at the bottom of the pit I had dug for myself with no visible means of escape. Life was miserable. I was miserable.

Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. -James Allen

James Allen

My external situation was dire. The person I had become was one that I did not like. What I needed was a miracle. And that miracle, it was one that only I could provide. I needed an internal miracle. The process was slow. It began with letting go of the past, then I had to remove the shackles of an uncertain future, and finally I had to concentrate on the present.

To affect the external, one must look at correcting the internal. If not, one might remain bound by anxiety.

Feature photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

Needless Worry

I have been holding a little stress lately, and I think I can even feel it in my midsection. This stress is the culmination of many different things, mostly the things which haven’t even happened yet. It is an uncertain future, and it is affecting my mind today.

The choices of my past have led me to this. It is good that I reflect on the past in the hopes of not repeating it tomorrow. But once I give its the due measure it deserves, I must let it go and move on. It is one of the core tenets of my philosophy. It is also one of the hardest ones to adhere to.

On the way home from Parkour practice, my son asked me an interesting question. “What is Space Force,” he asked. He saw the flag during the National Anthem at the beginning of the Superbowl. I told him it was an attempt to get back to where we used to be. As a nation, we once used to be at the forefront of space exploration. But the years went by, the funding went away, and eventually so did our preeminence.

“Oh,” he said, “I thought it was to keep the asteroids from hitting the planet.”

A fair point. We then discussed our inability to stop such cataclysmic events. Our conversation ranged from asteroids, dinosaurs, ice ages, super-volcanoes, and floods. They happen every so often. And no matter how great or advanced we think we are, there are some things we cannot avoid. Seeing as how they are out of our control; we can’t worry about the possibility of them occurring in the future. We must live in the present.

A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing the anxiety.

Bertrand Russell

It was a simple run-of-the-mill talk we had, but I wonder if he can do it. Can he live a life in the present, free of the shackles that are attached to the past and the present? I hope he will be able to. I hope there will come a time that I may be able to do it also. I am not there yet, but I think I am getting closer.

Feature photo by Chris Henry on Unsplash