I first listened to this podcast a few weeks ago while I was racing towards Flagstaff for work. And I hadn't really thought about it much until this afternoon when I started considering my own personal limits. Not only my physical limits, but also my capacity to deal with things mentally and emotionally. That introspection brought up some interesting questions about how, or why, those boundaries are created. Are they physiological? Or are they simply determined by the individual?
Give it a listen the next time you're driving to nowhere, or sitting at home searching for motivation. The stories will surely change your perspective on what you think is possible, and will probably make you want to push further into the red-zone the next time you're gettin' after it.
5 comments:
I love me some pod casts. Thanks for sharing the goods.
Listened to it last week. Those Slovenian war songs were great!
Maybe I could get you two to play some of those war songs while I climb on Cobble In The Sky... Speaking of which, are either of you psyched to go down to Maple soon? I gotta do that rig!
Mike,
When you come down please let us know and we will cook for you and your friends!!
Love,
Mom
Like extreme physical exercise, culture shock, drugs, and the perspective-enhancing nature of aging, extreme emotional/mental stress (breaking up with a long-time partner, the death of a relative or close friend, or the realization that what was once perceived as spiritual reinforcement is really just social reinforcement, etc.) forces an individual’s capacities (physical and mental) to flex, adjust, bend, break, mend, mold, compromise and generally evolve to maintain whatever new stress is applied to these capacities.A re-arranging of the whole. Breaking down and re-building muscle as a result of exercise creates a new form, and the rest of the body—again spiritual, mental, and physical—must then re-align or re-adjust. Craziest thing about this observation is that this constant state of broad individual adjustment (assuming that one has an active life with new stresses and experiences) creates an ever-changing representation of self. Your cells refresh themselves, as do the cadence of synaptic firings in the sweet meats, so you gotta wonder what remains beyond adaptation and new perspective/fitness? If the limits you talk about are really just the boundaries that define the Self, then maybe one’s nuance of adaptation (the how, what, and why behind it) is one’s only defining feature.
I’ve found that observing individual’s actions following large life events can be incredibly informative about one’s own self.
On the other hand, it can be pretty damn disheartening, too.
The ideas of ‘limits’ is real interesting in itself.
Same Q from a different angle: is it actual environmental stress or an ability/inability to adapt that represents itself as a ‘limit’? And, if a person ‘loses it’, how does that compare/relate to building muscles? Body builders have to buy larger clothing and ‘insane’ people have to don new characteristics to maintain their mending mental muscles.
Makes me wonder which stress-types are most beneficial to me? Now there’s something to tinker on.
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