Rolling Rocks: A good workout

Angeles Arien wrote some words that have been helpful to me throughout my life, but especially in fitness.  She offered four rules for life:  “Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don’t be attached to the results.”  Here’s why.

Show up.  No matter how perfectly we plan our workouts, they do nothing if we don’t do them.  We need to get out of our heads sometimes and into our bodies.  We get stronger by lifting weights, faster by running, more attuned to our bodies in space by doing some Pilates.  If we don’t take action, nothing happens.

 

Pay attention.  Once we do show up, we get best results when we take some care about what we’re doing.  (A half-hearted workout is better than no workout, but the point is still valid.)  When we focus on our form, we do better work.  Our bodies function better.  We learn and improve.

 

Tell the truth.  There are lots of ways to apply this one to our fitness journey.  I’ll talk about two.  When we’re trying to motivate ourselves to do our workouts, we have to tell the truth about what we want out of it.  If making our ex-partner drool when we run into them in the grocery store is what we really want, we need to own it; picturing them suffering as we sashay by will help us finish a tough set way more than pretending we’re there for our health.  (Of course, the reverse can be true too:  if what we want is to get to the top of the stairs with enough breath to take another step, we’re not going to be motivated by skinny jeans.)  The second place that the truth is important to our workouts is in our performance.  We need to notice when our form slips, even if we really want to lift one more, or one heavier.  We need to look clearly at what our bodies are doing today, even if it’s not what we want them to be doing.

 

Don’t be attached to the results.  At first this might sound like a contradiction to those other steps.  Of course we want good results of our work.  The thing is, we want to let the results take care of themselves.  We do the process and trust that results will come.  If we keep showing up, keep paying attention, keep telling the truth, we will get results.  We just need to keep our egos out of the way.  Another way to look at this might be to consider Sisyphus.  Who’s he?  He’s the guy from Greek mythology who was so bad in his lifetime that he was condemned to roll a giant rock up a hill over and over again for eternity.  Pretty nasty punishment, right?  Except for one thing.  If Sisyphus came to enjoy the process of rolling the rock and released attachment to getting it to stay at the top of the hill, his punishment becomes something else entirely.  Love the process and there is no punishment involved.

 

Go play.