This campaign season as pols postured for position during their power-tries we had a chance to see them forced to adapt to the circumstances of real life despite their target-fixation on self-empowerment.
When hurricane Sandy hammered NY, the red hats of political infighting came off and the blue hats of First- Responding went on.
What made them credible at the scene? Here they were locked in a power-seeking campaign, self-aggrandizing, framing facts to fit them, and suddenly they must confront real life and real people by flying into a disaster area. Every move they made was under scrutiny. How could anyone believe they were genuine?
Eastern Seaboard folks were largely into a collective vibe dealing with the storm confronting them. Flooding them. In come the pols. “Yeeeah, Right,” the person on the street may have thought, trudging through water and hearing news of the pols coming to town.
There is a contrast in perceived importance of dealing with real life versus dealing with personal ambition about real life. For the people hit by the storm, the pols were reduced in importance, unless they rolled up sleeves or used their power to help.
Similarly, for our children, our elders, our friends, coworkers, vexed supervisors or anyone we undertook to serve, were we to take an hour to train during their hour of need, they would probably take a dim view of it. No one cares how well trained we are until they know how much we care.
On the flip side, for the pols sold on the importance of their respective campaigns, when they heard of the disastrous super storm, they probably each said internally, “What? You have got to be kidding me. At the last minute, a Super Storm?” Yet there it was. Reality hit and they had to adapt.
They had to drop campaigning and help in some way. And they had to be sincere. People can sense the opposite.
That is how it is for us in our training lives. We have plans, have ambitions, and the desire to do more and be more in the big picture of our training lives. Then life happens. And we must ask ourselves, what were we preparing for with all of that training? Will it help others in their hours of need?
The sooner we drop our plans and embrace our service to others, the more meaningful our missed training time becomes. Yet we are not swooping in for a sound byte to face the needs of those we serve in our daily lives, we are going in with conviction, commitment, and the other qualities that training has kindled in us.
Engaging the life that happens to interrupt our training with decisiveness and commitment will improve what training we can work in by exponents, and will brace our mental attitude for future progress beyond measure. It will also clear our consciences to plumb quality out of short intervals.
Until we tell ourselves the truth about the priorities of our duties, what we train for, the degree of training we will allow ourselves and accept, we have not adapted fully to our circumstances. Until we adapt, we harbor an incompleteness inside about both our training and what we were training for, ultimately.
Politicians probably feel something similar in their temptation to not fully adapt, to fake it, and fake a response to a crisis in the middle of a campaign. But they can’t afford it. When they get to the impact zone and see the laboring faces, suddenly, they have to get honest very quickly with the people they meet.
Adaptive fitness recognizes our convergence of needs and honestly says, this isn’t ideal but I own it. I’m going to admit it, accept it, and see how I may make a shorter training evolution work well in the circumstances. It is good because it is responsible. It is good because it makes us better at handling the onslaught.
When we think and train adaptively while serving others it can be focused and high quality because there is no internal guilt associated with it. We’ve accepted an underdog training situation. Expectations are off. We are free to surprise ourselves. We can hit our stepping stones out of the onslaught.
By so doing we can improve our mental and bodily constitution to see through the onslaught, and when our training life gets back to normal, we will be happy that we considered even the small training opportunities as genuine. We weren’t training snobs. We were citizen-family people-volunteer-worker-athletes.
There will come the windfalls later, the fair weather, and spacious times.
More specifics on how-to, and the benefits of doing this will be available in the M7 Adaptive Fitness Guidebook around mid-December.
Thank you for spending a few minutes reading the adaptive essay. (O:
adapt for the fun of it