“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Frederick Douglass
A man will agonize over the big decisions and never once look at the small piece of ground he covers every morning without thinking about it. Twenty steps from the door of the house to the door of the car. Nothing happens out there. Nobody’s watching. And for a lot of men, that walk is where the whole day already got decided.
Here’s the season I’m in right now. I’m writing this book a chapter at a time, in real time, which means every week I go back into years I had filed away as handled and look at them again with grown eyes. And I’m still sitting down with my mentor the way I have every week for years, because I am not exempt from one word of this. What I’m about to tell you about myself, I did not see on my own.
Here’s what happened this week that drove that idea home for me.
A man I’ve been working with told me about his mornings. He pulls the front door shut behind him, and the second he hears it latch, the narration starts. Today’s going to be awful. It’s going to be hard. You’re going to screw it up. Twenty steps of that, every day, before he’s turned the key.
I asked him how it makes him feel. He said awful. I said no, how do you actually feel.
He stopped. Tight, he said. Heavy. Frustrated. Empty.
Is that how you want to start your day?
Of course not, he said. But it’s automatic.
It is automatic. That’s not a character flaw, it’s a habit, and it got built the same way the good ones get built. A thought runs, then it runs again, and the brain starts reaching for it the way it reaches for anything it’s practiced. Here’s the part men hate hearing. He’s getting something out of it. It isn’t good for him and he’s still getting something. Nobody keeps a pattern alive for years that pays him nothing.
I know that walk of his, except mine was a shower.
There was a stretch of my life where everything around me was chaos, and one morning I got in the shower and my mind put a scene in front of me involving my partner at the time. I didn’t think it. I felt it, all the way through my body, like it was happening. Then it happened again. Inside of two weeks I would reach for the shampoo bottle and I was gone, standing in something that never took place, feeling every bit of it as though it had.
That’s what I brought to my mentor, because I was not getting out of it by myself. And what I finally understood is that I could not think my way out. The thinking was the thing that was running.
So the next time it started, I turned the water to cold.
That’s the whole move. I couldn’t change my mind, so I changed my body.
Men, you cannot reason with a program while you’re standing inside it. You lose that argument every time, because the thing making the argument is the thing you’re arguing with. What breaks it is physical. Cold water. Twenty push-ups. On your knees in the hallway. Something immediate and inconvenient enough to interrupt a road you were already halfway down.
Then go find the road. Where are your twenty steps? What’s the stretch of your day that nobody sees, where the same sentence gets said to you by you, and you’ve heard it so many times you filed it under the truth?
This week’s lesson: the thought isn’t the problem. The route is. You’ve driven it so long you forgot you picked it.
