Sure, Life is an “extreme sport”!
Are we willing to engage our full potential?
As humans, we cruise through our life and do our work everyday in an effort to live purposefully or leave a legacy. Meanwhile world-at-large — things, people, processes etc — around us continually changes. Change, as the cliched saying goes, is the only thing constant in life. In my observation, I found that some of us can ride these waves of change smoothly to accomplishments. “Explorers”, as I have to come call them, in general, seem to step back and look at life and major activities that we all do everyday to fulfill our needs, differently. They perceive life changes as surfers/divers look at tides in ocean — nonchalantly? — and this perception shift enables them to engage with life fearlessly as if they have a tide prediction table! They achieve multiple life times of work in a single human life span. I postulate that any of us here can evolve or transform our human form into such an explorer form*, so that the need to work or play hard functions differently — much as how extreme sport athletes performance differs from regular Joe. This blog explores it further.
Interested? Let’s jointly seek where to look for our warp drive’s on-switch is!
Participating : X-sport and the Explorers
How life is an extreme sport for some of us? Wikipedia says for any game to qualify as an “extreme sport” both the expression terms need to be fulfilled;
- “sport”: The participant has to dispose of considerable skill and/or physical ability to avoid poor execution of the activity;
- “extreme”: poor execution of the activity has to result in considerable risk of serious physical harm to the participant;
Currently life isn’t a game for many since we do it seriously! It precludes taking life sportingly and limits ourselves to acquiring only necessary skills for rat-race (and not sufficient ones) to fulfill all human needs that Maslow called out. So life ends up being seriously-limiting. The “Explorers” among us, on the other hand, do play life as X-sport irrespective of whether they compete in X-games or not. This life-view, gives birth to more successful outcomes in a single life time than mere mortals can conceive. In addition they are admired for their energy and joie de vivre, since they don’t adorn serious or long faces as badge of honor after achieving conventional “success”. Also health and lifestyle disease free living seems to accompany them even as they age.
There are many examples of such explorers but typically they have titles like leaders of business/social organizations, entrepreneurs or artists, poets or even yogis, mystics just to name a few from the different ends of human spectrum. I am sure you can think of a few names now? To get technical, it is as if they can take on the Maslow’s need-hierarchy from both ends — physiological to self-actualization — not sequentially but simultaneously and dualistically. By transcending the hierarchical articulation, they boldly face the X-sport challenges. They also develop considerable skills and take risks of serious personal harm, both to avoid poor passing-thru of life journey or this trip to planet earth like regular Joe and to progress towards the target outcomes in their lifetime. They make a few physical and mental shifts in their life that collectively form-shifts them from human to explorer’s way of life.
Explorer form , goes beyond mindset changes, into a shifted or transformed personal life-approach for handling real-life challenges.
Having right mindset, while helpful, does not go far as it affects only the psychological realm of humans since mindsets are nothing but an established set of attitudes held by someone. By trans-form-ing, Explorers create a radical shift or “second-tier” of functioning dynamically. This helps to engage and sustain a pace of life that is enriched both by the life skills acquired and the satisfaction from performing them effectively in high risk-reward situations.
Playbook: Well being balanced with Success
There are many playbooks available from time immemorial to modern day conditions. Timothy Gallaway wrote the inner game of tennis/golf and this has become the go-to guide for many sport stars. A recent sports star has also discusses his approach to personal well being. “What if you could become measurably more focused and effective in your work without burning out even if you’re really busy” and “get rooted in your Center and enter a state of mastery as often as possible” asks Scott Jeffrey in Mastery method. One simple rule of such X-sport is to balance the polarities as Barry Johnson suggests — balancing success with well being, the risk of extreme with the joy of the sport or fun of acquiring a skill. While there are many principles and best practices, you too can create your own playbook for this X-sport.
Principle : Revisit Passion & Purpose
What aids or propels us and blocks us from turning on this internal warp engine? Most of the readers here, and by extension people above object poverty line, are passionate about something that we do in our life such that we are almost devoted to it. Object and purpose of such focus and attention can be many; for example, professional career that you engage in — even though its basic rationale is to earn a living. It can also be a home activity (being a parent, good neighbor or community member), or hobby (sports, weekend-adventure, religious, political party etc) that we engage outside of work. Common denominator in all these, is that the time we spend there may not be monetized and yet they bring us immense joy and make us come alive to express ourselves and engage with life fully.
Time, however, limits this world view since we see life as You-only-live-once (YOLO!). Given life is measured quantitatively as the time spent on earth between birth and death, in general considered scarce, the years of life becomes the unit of optimization. We want to maximize and pack as many activities into them as our attention span can muster without overloading ideally (or sometimes overload life with more and stress out or have breakdowns!). Agreed such passionate activities give us new competency or work/life skill and supports our goal to perfect them during our lifespan. Applying principles of sports training which costs time, is a good way to stay focused and improve our performance conventionally.
Certainly, as busy individuals, we optimize and prioritize life activities with respect to time so that it yields maximum work /life benefit to us, generates higher impact that we can create to the society or world around us. What is oft overlooked is, how devotedly we perform such activities! Explorers devote their time — be it work or love making or what ever else they do at any given moment — to deepen their passionate involvement to a state of devotion, for it to become an X-sport. This shifts scarce time to abundance of opportunity.
Consider this Facebook share from a friend :
Many people who approach the practice of Buddhism are willing to sacrifice one or two hours of their day in order to perform some ritual practice or engage in meditation. Time is relatively easy to give up, even though their life may be very busy. But, they are not willing to change anything of their personality — they are not willing to forgo anything of their negative character. With this type of approach to Buddhism, it hardly matters how much meditation we do, our practice remains merely a hobby or a sport. It does not touch our lives. In order actually to overcome our problems, we have to be willing to change — namely to change our personality. We need to renounce and rid ourselves of those negative aspects of it that are causing us so much trouble.
***The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra
For the willing, this shift from passion and purpose to devotion is larger-than-life (aka MTP) to help produce collaborative outcomes in short amount of time with the help of others meaningfully. It is a key difference between being open and focused vs closed and having blinders on in our goal pursuit. Explorers also accept all outcomes including undesired ones with equanimity. In the absence of confirmed research work, one can question if such a shift works across domains (or only to specific ones like spirituality or religion as in the quote above) broadly to all human endeavors. Nevertheless, one can see that explorers exhibit joy or exuberance essentially because of the gratitude emerging from being equanimous. This incidentally keeps them healthy as their batteries are charged like energizer bunnies despite of long work days filled with tasks and less sleep quota than conventional 8 hours.
Practice skills and taking risks
Finally is there a key practice that helps is developing life skills and in safely taking risks (oxymoronic!)? Skill developed is a function of experiences we are willing to subject ourselves and risk tolerance we have developed. Succeeding in risks taken is a source of human confidence. Note that we all want comfort and conveniences in life but taking risk is not aligned with neither the desire for safety nor self-confident way of handling life. Explorers, who generally tend to be humble and not arrogant, shift from confidence to clarity as the core of their emergent action, which is an atypical behavior.
Typically we have bucket-list for our growth and achievements desired and not approach them organically. What if we can practice combing planned outcomes with emergent actions? This is precisely how explorers seem to nullify stress, as they are committed to working for an outcome without being attached to it. Safety results by taking decisions towards those outcomes based on what one feels appropriate in the here-and-now and in a not locked-in manner. Also, they patiently and gratefully accept the invisible hand of the universe to lend its support in jointly shaping the outcomes.
With awareness of such playbook, principles and practices, how will you shift your life? I love to hear from you. God speed to you in your quest!
