Climbing the mountain of your potential can be a perilous journey with ubiquitous hazards. We make our trek, listen to the perennial wisdom, in an attempt to find the center in all the chaos of this tumultuous tugging, blasting, buffeting our lives a thousand ways at once.
We can get fixated on staring up at the summit. It’s when we become attached to “peaking” that we often fatigue and “fall” suffering the ilk of injury and setback. We then must camp and await convalescence. Sometimes we must even get help to trek back down to the base, to the bottom of the Valley due to the severity of these injuries.
No matter how much progress you see from a particular program, you must stop or change your program BEFORE you meet diminishing returns. It’s our collective challenge. You face it. I face it. The greed for “peaking” is very seducing.
But the “peak” is a trap. And you can avoid it if you stop before diminishing returns, and redirect your focus into a different area/venue. You can later cycle back to the original idea. What you discover is that you do not start at the beginning but rather you start at the beginning plus “a little.” I have learned that its more important to progress “a little” consistently and safely, than to lurch up at that perceived “peak.”
In physical Training, this refers to the boundaries of over-training. We must become in tune with our membrane between increasing our durability, our toughness, and the Ultimate Failure Point – the line of injury and illness. The allure of progress can and has taken many of us into the forbidden zone way to often. This is uncharted territory and you could become lost, injured, or worse.
Our climb is not a tender one. It takes determination and persistence to leverage ego and discard attachments. But we also need patience and compassion for ourselves.
The trap is that we never “arrive” at the peak. Life is a journey not a destination, a process not a product. It’s the expectation that gets us. It’s our attachment to what it must be like at the “peak” which undermines our fulfillment, replacing it with this insane desire. We climb to REALIZE our capabilities, to uncover our depth of talent, genius, and abundance. But the work doesn’t end there. Our mountain retreat is not a vacation villa, but rather a community service.
All of our lives we are taught that ascending the mountain of our potential is the end in itself. We become entrapped in a narcissistic feedback loop. We confuse a vantage point with ultimate purpose. We push that rock of our ego up the mountain only to get to the top and have it roll back down to the adjacent valley. We do this over and over, injury after injury.
The purpose is simply to stop pushing the rock, to climb our mountain, to help others along the way, and to ask for help when we unwittingly become snared ourselves in our own process.
Very Respectfully,
Scott B. Sonnon