Many people find great challenge in maintaining a consistent personal practice due to their “work schedule.” When we neglect our health we commonly rationalize it by saying that we’re “too busy.” We rush around frenetically until we face a traumatic experience: a debilitating injury or a death in the family. At those times the stark reality of our precious minutes of life, of just how little time we have to be with friends and family, feels like sand grains falling through an hourglass.
I rushed through the past two decades on a sea of competitions, travels, adventures, projects, performances, lectures, and seminars. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE what my life has included – every minute of it. But I realize that I ‘missed’ a lot of my experiences due to fear of failure and embarrassment, fear of poverty, and fear of making an insignificant contribution to my community.
So often my mind was in the future, planning and strategizing, rather than “in the moment” of what I was doing. How many projects went sour because of my lack of focus? How many competitions were lost? How many friends and family did I ignore or neglect? We’re all guilty of this, but we don’t need to wait for tragedy to reform our worldviews.
The birth of my children taught me that all of my plans and goals are meager in comparison to the vibrancy of life. My plans and goals are now more focused, more concentrated. They surround a celebration of that vibrancy that is life; they’re not a distraction from it.
If we rush forward without a stable center all of our efforts are for naught. They don’t latch in. It’s like rushing to the car and forgetting your keys. Hurrying to clean up the kitchen and knocking over the milk. Teaching your children good manners only to curse when you slam your finger in the door. Frantically trying to meet a deadline only to forget a crucial component of the project. Flying through your exercises and pulling a muscle at the end. We must find our calm composure and work from that solid, lucid foundation.
I don’t believe it’s necessarily about “slowing down.” Living a high performance life can be fulfilling, and it can be beneficial to everyone in one’s sphere of influence. But it’s also about realizing that plans and goals are not in front of us like a carrot. They are always and already around us, like the laughter of children filling a room. We only need to realize that we stand in the epicenter of life’s vibrancy — and revel in its absolute bliss.
TACFIT is a healthy high performance balance of the “Centeredness” of the East and the “Progress” of the West. Both are necessary. Some of us come to discover our ‘center’ through forward progress. Others come to understand ‘forward progress’ only by having a stable base – centeredness. The goal is to identify where we are in our lives, our strength, and to seek out that other in which we are weak so that we create an ongoing balancing act of Centeredness and Progress
Very Respectfully,
Scott B. Sonnon