A scientist once valued the medicinal properties of plants and linked their healing and prescriptive qualities to the body part they most resembled. A heart-shaped leaf, he surmised, might cure ailments of the heart.

This approach came from a theory that the Great Creator purposely designed one creation (plants) to resemble another (humans) so we might connect the similarities and find healing through nature. The Creator’s intent marked the plants with a recognizable “signature”, so the theory was known as the Doctrine of Signatures.

The Doctrine of Signatures was slowly abandoned when scientific progress revealed overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What was lost is a mystery.

I once met a woman who presented to me as mysterious medicine.

Her lips were doctrine. Seeing them for the first time, I was convinced of qualities she possessed, concocting truths and holding them to be self-evident.

I saw on her lips a signature, shaped so that I might discern with a glance the depth of a savage soul.

But the way she spoke, spitting splinters of glass through those lips from a ravaged structure, from some abandoned hope, from the darkness of a once human-occupied place now choking in twisted decay, forced an unforgiving, impartial science that turned my back to her face. The myth evaporated before my eyes.

What is beautiful is not always true.

What was lost is a mystery.

1. The myth we live by

The Marine’s Hymn is an ode to the fighting man, whose exploits in the air, on land, and sea are carried out at great sacrifice to keep his honor clean. The Marine is the “first to fight.” The streets of heaven are purportedly guarded by United States Marines.

The myth of the Marine creates a mindset in every Marine of bold men doing brave exploits for a higher cause. The mythos is a “law” unto itself, compelling Marines toward a specific perspective and congruent behavior. To do anything less is to dishonor not only yourself, but the Corps as an institution and every surly Marine who has ever served.

Marines are encouraged to study the traits of true leaders who embody the ethos, to meditate on the Law of the Marine.

The Law of God (universal) is the cause-and-effect relationship that governs our elegant universe and the nature of human relationship to all created things.

Reduced to ten commandments, the Law of Moses is the signifying law that the Old Testament warrior Joshua insists a man “meditate on day and night” so that he “acts in accordance” and becomes prosperous and successful. Joshua encourages a man so oriented not to be dismayed or afraid, but strong and courageous.

To “meditate day and night” sounds like the lifestyle of an uber-monk, but how our minds function reveals otherwise. Joshua was no monk. He led the Israelites into Canaan as their military commander, sacked cities, ousted some 31 kings, and took Jericho.

So what does a savage warrior like Joshua gain from meditation?

Fearlessness.

2. The thoughts that shape us

We become what we habitually think about. The tape running continuously in our minds is not conscious thought, but a subconscious flow of images and ideas generated from my worldview—what I really believe.

As I do my day, I may expect to encounter a limitless number of idiots and assholes, or I may expect to depend on the kindness of strangers. In either case, I am certain to be correct.

My experience of the world provides evidence for a preconceived notion about the nature of things: what I truly believe about people, my relationship to my fellow man, the world’s systems, and God. From a more self-centric angle, my experience is rooted in whether I believe I have the existential juice to do something worthwhile.

I experience what I expect.

These are the conversations we have with ourselves, all day, every day.

Our conscious thought, when unfettered from the task at hand, chooses a single idea to hook and fixate on, reeling it into the mind. Once we masticate and release it, we choose another. These ideas are replayed and reevaluated: a play cast with new characters committing the same crimes, uplifting moments of connection to a benevolent humanity, or the sudden seizure of a bright knowing that you’re going to pull it off.

To “meditate day and night” on the ineffable truth of universal law is to change, through practice, the reservoir from which our ideas and images surface. Mythos becomes ethos becomes pathos. It’s like choosing a song to get stuck in your head, one that plays without conscious thought.

But to understand how my experience of the world is governed by this system, I must recognize that I have more than one mind.

3. The body believes

Our bodies have a mind of their own that interacts with the brain. Habits live in our bodies. The “body-mind” has a memory, preferences, capacity, and traumas that live in our muscles and connective tissues. These present as automated reactions, movement patterns, and chronic knots.

Our gut is called the “second brain” because 70% of neurological signaling originates in our guts. The gut is the source of mood, mental clarity or fog, edginess or relaxation, the experience of “good” and “bad.” What I feed it creates the world in which I live.

Our reptilian and mammalian brains operate beneath the neocortex. The reptilian brain drives instinct, impulse, and survival. Our mammalian brain has implicit memory; it “reads” people and deals not in language but in behavior and emotion—the “gut feeling” that is so often true about people, regardless of what they say. These are our “body-minds.”1

These patterns run deep.

These are the “laws” we live by.

The body-mind is retrained slowly, requiring the patience of a strength athlete. The brain-mind thinks. The body-mind believes because it knows. I do not experience the world through what I think, but through what I believe.

Integration of the two minds requires conscious effort and aligned action. Like a musician learning guitar, the conscious mind must focus what it learns through the fingers. Once the body has memorized it, conscious attention is no longer needed. This is embodied knowledge: brain-hand integration, habituated movement, a program that runs autonomously when triggered.

Our lives run on such programs: lighting a cigarette after a meal, driving a car, and reacting to a challenge at work or an inconvenience in the day. Ninety percent of my behavior is automated.

4. Training a new rhythm

The path to a richer life begins in imagination, the spirit of the rational mind. From it, I may envision a different version of life: sweeter, fuller, infused with possibility and novelty, or with the assurance that the city I intend to sack will indeed fall. I may envision reconciliation with an old severance or escape from a lifestyle that’s killing me.

But the path to a truer life is found through the body, learning to attend to signals that originate in the gut and muscles. This is a deeper method of “reading,” discerning the prose, fiction, and occasional poetry that people write with their faces and bodies.

This is finding rhythm in the churn.

The power of the conscious mind is limited; the force of will burns out quickly. But I can harness it to direct and orient my body. First, I examine what I believe, as evidenced by how my body behaves. Second, I imagine an alternative universe based on a new belief. I shift my focus toward that belief and recruit my body through repeated action.

At first, the actions are conscious and cumbersome, like learning a new chord on guitar or pausing to read the checkout guy as a human being. Over time, my body memorizes them, and I move through the world in a new way, with a newfound freedom.

Intentional focus on the highest truth—what often emerges from my lowest brain—turns down the volume on noise. Like a lifter who focuses on the heavy staples of strength rather than the gym bro who avoids them for auxiliary pumps. The gym bro may appear strong but lacks the raw function of strength in real life. When the heavy things must be carried, the work is not done well, or at all, or ends in injury.

Most actors don’t do their own stunts.

Contemplation on the “law” is the embodiment of truth. It trains a man to move well under load.

A man whose body knows how to move under load is unafraid.

Life is a game of minutes. The totality of life’s churn is felt not in its lyrics, but in its funky-ass baseline. Our bodies move to beats, not lyrics.

Hips betray; eyes don’t lie; 200# always weighs 200#.

Rhythm is something I first attend to consciously, but then feel. The beat that “goes on” is an automated cadence. I’ve heard it said that how you spend your days is how you spend your life. Disrupting an unsatisfactory rhythm requires upsetting the status quo.

Rearrange the furniture. Jettison the flotsam. Exchange one thing for another.

5. One true sentence

It’s direct, simple, pure. It is the opposite of the culture in which we live.

The cacophony of today’s culture screams from every screen, post, and conversation: conform, worship, optimize, or die. Be a provider, protector, predator, soft, strong, vulnerable, stoic. Shut up and perform.

I’m weighed, measured, and found wanting before I even open my mouth. Too fat, too soft, too toxic, too privileged, too broken, too masculine. Lose the weight, get ripped, climb the ladder, stack the wins, eat the right shit, watch the right feeds, pick a side, have the correct opinion, all while they tell me the marrow of my manhood is intimidating to the unwashed masses and I should apologize for existing.

Work until your body breaks, smile while you do it, and expect nothing back. Not respect. Not desire. Not even a genuine thank you. Just grind, provide, repeat, then die quietly so no one is inconvenienced by your absence.

F*ck that noise.

Hemingway once said his goal was to write one true sentence every day.

Seek what’s true. Gaze at it. Put your hands to it. Blood in muscles, butterflies in your stomach, bone deep.

Write one true sentence every day.

I found it incredible that this day, lacking all omens and premonitions, should be the day of my implacable death. Despite my deceased father, despite my having been a child in a symmetrical garden in Hai Feng—was I, now, about to die? Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me.1

In my last post, I explored the power of imagination through the framework of “What if...” and “But if Not...” The reordering of one’s reality or, at least, his experience of reality, begins with the imaginative envisioning of an alternate way of being, which means an alternate way of interacting with the world in which he lives. In this instance, conducting a “Hard Routine” was a response to the glaring and demoralizing gap between my enduring view of myself and the man reflected in the actual and figurative mirror.

The Hard Routine has done, and continues to do, its intended work. As always, it is a combination of intentional actions and eliminations, the “for versus from“ of focused engagement in specific activities, doing something for its proven benefit, and the abstinence from specific things to eliminate the harm they cause. Of note, I followed a gut health protocol (gut = second brain) that has positively improved every quantifiable aspect of my life. Highly recommended.

Feeling better and getting stronger, while beneficial, are not the point of going hard. The point is to reclaim the mettle to choose in any given moment that which benefits myself and others the most, to break the chains of slavery to appetite, and to once again man my post as the sentinel of all that is best in my life.

It is to become unfuckwithable again.

My vision for who I am (and aim to be) and why I’m here is what enables me to filter the “dos and don’ts” of a hard prescription. It is action and inaction filtered through and born from envisioned identity. This is why I am contemplating imagination as the singular force vital to experiential reality, for better or worse.

How I envision myself creates me, initially, and from that, the world I inhabit. Since we know ourselves only through our relationship to others and other created things, the way I imagine others and other created things is also how I know myself. We know ourselves in relation.

We also know ourselves in powerfully figurative ways, symbolically, more than we do as a literal or functional cog in some grand machine. We appropriate identities from a limitless list of ideas and symbols: national, political, religious, sexual, generational, and so on.

Many of these are symbols that contain entire mythological structures, populated with images and stories, many of which are, at best, abstract and, at worst, meaningless. But, when I say that I “am” one of those or another, I appeal to its myth, saying at once “I am like that” and this is how you can figuratively “know” the version of me I think I am or am pretending to be. Such images contain truths to which we relate. Though a categorical reduction, it functions as a reasonably approximate generalization that enables another person to generate an idea of what “type” of person the other is, e.g., “he’s a retired cop,” or a “Southern Baptist pastor,” or a lesbian who manages a Starbucks, though these tell me nothing about the individual as a person.

Such descriptors are tacit, accepted ideations, powerful in their effect and affect. Eventually, on the road to maturation and wholeness, one must realize that prepackaged myths and ideas fail to capture the uniqueness of being intrinsic to each of us. I may have any number of things in common with any of such ideas, and yet am not really any of them.

To derive one’s identity from any categorical descriptor, even the richest and most mythical, is to have no authentic personal identity at all. Yet, humans know best through symbol and image. So it is to imagination that we must turn to fully express my preferred concept of freedom, that of a seed both allowed and nourished toward becoming that which it truly is, the only thing that it can adequately, and, perhaps, perfectly, become.

The word “myth” inevitably brings Joseph Campbell’s work to mind, in particular the idea that dreams are personal myths and myths are our collective dreams. Myth is collective imagination. Through myth, we understand the deepest truths of the human experience, both humanity’s predicaments and mysteries. Regrettably, we are collectively and imaginatively limited by the materialistic dogma of modernity to what we can explain, though it is that which we cannot explain that holds the most enduring truths about who and what we are.

ETYMOLOGY

The English word imagination entered the language in the mid-14th century as imaginacioun. It was borrowed from Old French imaginacion (also spelled ymaginacion), which meant “concept, mental picture; hallucination.”

The Old French term comes directly from Latin imāginātiō, a noun of action meaning “imagination, a fancy, or the act of forming images.”

This explains why, in early modern English, “imagination” and “fancy” (a shortened form of fantasy from Greek phantasía) were sometimes treated as near synonyms. Over time, “imagination” came to carry more weight of creative or solemn mental power, while “fancy” leaned toward the lighter or more whimsical.

The word has always centered on the mind’s ability to form, manipulate, and represent images, whether sensory-based, creative, hypothetical, or illusory. Imagination is frequently described as the power to picture the unseen, form mental derivations from likenesses, or create new realities in the mind.

UGLINESS

My recent concern with imagination in late modernity, using myself as a sample, is not that its capacity has diminished, per se, but that it has been confined by four or so centuries of progressively restrictive scientific naturalism, limiting my ability to think beyond the mechanistic constituents of a scientifically elucidated universe. Simply put, “science” (i.e., materialism) has become increasingly more aggressive in its “ruling out” of any considerations not directly observable or quantifiable. It has reduced being itself to pieces and parts acting upon each other in chemical or mechanical chains that produce reactions or changes, ignoring even the possibility, despite eons of human belief in and dynamic experience of, an unobservable “force” or “energy” that saturates and sustains all of what is. Maybe there exists yet a quantum hope.

One ubiquitous example of how stripping our worldview of the metaphysical has produced regrettable consequences is America’s national aesthetic. Reduced to functionality, predictability, efficiency, and control, all filtered through the perpetuation of consumption, the average interstate interchange area typifies the ugliness of our materialist worldview. They’re mostly all the same: crowded with loud signage, bland rectangular buildings, frustrated motorists, and overprocessed assembly line food. It’s just ugly.

Our intellectual ugliness fares no better.

I fear that the religion of my youth, my “studies” at a state university, and the culture in which I have matured have bequeathed to me a thinking capacity equivalent in quality to that of a truck stop strip mall.

Possessed of a third-rate mind and a discernible dearth of education and training, my power to contend with concepts such as “mind” or “spirit” as the basis for all reality is limited, and so I turn to philosophers like Dr. David Bentley Hart to shatter the thinking models that further restrict my meager contemplations. I am often overwhelmed by the depth of scholarship and the breadth of historical context required to understand such things. I search as I must for “the point”, or a single accessible concept, which cannot be reached without frequent sojourns into relational frameworks, historical evolutions of thought, and a rather intense purification of inherited models and erroneous interpretations. It amounts to a prerequisite unlearning before introducing something new to learn. I must first be deprogrammed.

I’ve encountered in myriad spiritual traditions, both eastern and western, that enlightenment itself, a regrettably threadbare concept, is often framed similarly, as a process of unburdening. It’s the purgation of false frameworks, unchecked desires, errant ideologies, assumptions, biases, and immature conclusions; the active process of light-en-ing.

Enlightenment is the cleaning out of closets.

The effect on my thinking is at once pervasive and disruptive, one that has cracked open the shell of the mental nut in which I have been unknowingly trapped, a combination of ignorance and an untrained mind. It is less like a slow expansion of mental boundaries and much more like a new bird struggling through its eggshell, from the dark, wet cavern of incubation into an impossible world of color effulgent with late morning sunlight, to ask in startled amazement, “What is all that?”

The question: what if I’ve been confined to a small mechanical mental box and taught to believe that’s all there is? Beyond it, the world of magic and daemons and angels and sprites and lore is relegated to childlike fancy, to “superstition”, or religion, which, of course, no self-respecting intellect would deign to take seriously. Or would they? In that sense, I’ve been robbed of my imagination, and the line of power running through it has been severed by cultural intellectual fencing. No wonder life often feels flat.

Having fully awakened from his dream, the dreamer—or former dreamer—might momentarily reflect upon the ingenious intricacy of the distortions by which his sleeping mind had transformed the world around him into another world altogether. He may know that dreams seem coherent only from within, and that the limits that enclose them always lie very nearby, bounded by impenetrable mists. It is only because a dreamer has temporarily lost the desire to turn his eyes toward more distant horizons that he believes he inhabits a reality perfectly complete in itself, in need of no further explanation. He does not see that this secondary world rests upon no foundations, has no larger story, and persists as an apparent unity only so long as he had forgotten how to question its curious omissions and contradictions. Even so, now that the man has arisen he still cannot help but marvel at the artistry with which his dreaming mind wove one reality, however evanescent, from the disparate elements of another: a bell in a tower, a windblown valley, reeds stirring along the banks of a stream, all conjured up from a wind chime ringing beyond an open window, a momentary breeze, a susurration of leaves below the sill.

How remarkable that, when the critical intellect has fallen dormant, the imagination is still capable of such feats of invention. And how exquisite the many ways in which the fabric of the dream preserved the shape of the real world within its deepest patterns, and even imitated the cogency of waking consciousness: the reality of things was present all along, but only under the guise of another reality altogether. This is something, though, that one can appreciate only in the light of morning, once one has emerged from dreams. For while those who have awakened know what it is to sleep, those who are still asleep do not remember what it is to be awake.2

If I have ignorantly relegated to imagination all notions beyond the material, so far as my concept of reality is concerned, it is to imagination that I must turn. What is imagination, the source of its power, and why does it feel so difficult to activate? If imagination is the catalyst for all creativity, invention, and transformation, what is it that so short-circuits what ought to be an inherent human power?

Why have we become so dull, easily manipulated, angered, and lifeless? Am I awake?

CHILD & MASTER

To frame imagination in the development of a human mind, consider the beginning and the culmination represented by the “Child” and the “Master.” Children naturally possess a spontaneity that enables them to conjure an imaginary world and to temporarily live in it. From my own childhood, sticks are swords, a plywood lean-to is my castle, and my playmates are the hale warriors accompanying me on my quest. And these things are not a five-minute fancy, but afternoons stretched across an entire summer, with increasingly complex narrative developments, titles and back stories, victories and promotions, new characters wandering haplessly into the story, and the sorrow of mourning for a lost brother (who was grounded by his mother).

Spontaneity isn’t a thing in and of itself, but is a natural manifestation of a lack of things, those things being mental constraints. Children are spontaneous because they have not yet been mentally bludgeoned into acceptance of a limited and excruciatingly banal “reality.” Adults are spontaneous when they’re drunk, i.e., uninhibited.

Childhood fancy is not the imagination that alters reality in an adult world. Only a mind fully formed through discipline, training, and embodied experimentation can harness the power of imagination in the intuitive mind. However, the magic of a child’s imagination, as any healthy child demonstrates, is its limitlessness. We, too, must remove the obstacles that hinder us. We must become like little children to see the Kingdom of God.

He had never lingered among the pleasures of memory. Impressions, momentary and vivid, would wash over him: a potter’s vermillion glaze; the sky-vault filled with stars that were also of gods; the moon, from which a lion had fallen; the smoothness of marble under his sensitive, slow fingertips; the taste of wild boar meat, which he liked to tear at with brusque, white bites; the nearness of the sea or women; heavy wine, its harsh edge tempered by honey—these things could flood the entire circuit of his soul. He had known terror, but he had known wrath and courage as well, and once he had been the first to scale an enemy wall. ... He had listened to complex stories, which he took in as he took in reality—without asking whether they were true or false.3

The Master, following years of dedication to a single thing, so embodies knowledge that he becomes it, a living manifestation of the thing, mind and body fully integrated. The tool is an extension of himself. From this, intuitive thought is unleashed to imagine and reimagine, to literally create, uninhibited by external limitations, divinely spontaneous.

It may be instructive to consider the “mind” as a system comprising distinct but interrelated agents: the agents of rational thought (bodily or psychic), heart (willpower or soul), and spirit (metaphysical or emotional). The system of the “Mind” is not compartmentalized into these agents as distinct and autonomous minds of body, soul, and spirit. Each of these does not function autonomously except under the influence of the others. They are intrinsic to one another, like the organs in the body’s system, and are mutually reliant. Much like what I eat affects my entire system, for better or worse, such is the realm of the mind’s system. I’ve found it helpful to think of mental inputs as nutrition for my mind’s system. Anything that goes into it, first through sensual absorption, and moreover that which is digested as a mental fixation, affects the entire system. The analogy is not without neuroscientific support, and the phenomena appear repeatedly in the trajectories of history’s best-known contemplatives.

Interestingly, 70% of neurophysiological signaling originates in the gut, physically creating the symptoms we know as mental problems like anxiety, “disorders”, and stress. Not only are the agents of my mind’s system inextricably linked, so are the functions of my body and mind. Nutrition, as such, is everything I consume, whether visual, auditory, environmental, or the food I eat.

This dynamic of interconnection is relevant because our powers of imagination seem to atrophy as we mature. But, it may be that our powers are prevented from acting or are suffocated by the accumulation of certain psychophysiological morbidities, just as our bodies are degraded by sedentary, ill-fed lifestyles. Bad food not only lacks nutritional value but also causes systemic damage; therapeutic foods are nutritional and contain healing properties; and then there’s everything else. Since intuitive thinking is of the highest order and is the function of an integrated Mind System, just as elite athleticism is of the body and central nervous system, understanding how it works requires consideration of its care and feeding.

Thankfully, there remains ample room for the romantic.

THE MUSE

Imagination is a Muse serving grand wormwood that cracks through the languid banality of a beach excursion to haunt an otherwise ordinary moment, one where the horizon extends not only forever before me like a gleaming seam, but through and behind me, past my birth and the long sweltering line of humanity, into a cavernous space of void toward a spark in the dark, primordial ignition.

How I grip my hand around her wrist and feel hot, oiled skin stretched across bone, the rolling sinews beneath my fingertips, the most living tissue I know.

The Muse whispers a story to me in gusts, an epic where a young, poor boy is given strange gifts by mischievous gods: an insatiable appetite for plates of food, a disposition to find the most frightening things quizzically funny, and a lust for speed, flight, chaos, and blunt impact; how that boy saw the world as cosmic theater and snuck into the court of the king wearing a second-hand costume, uttering memorized lines of poetry, and made a go of it.

How he expanded along the flat trajectories of possibility, swelling to take it all in, to consume and accrue neat stacks of objects and titles, buckets of messy experiences, pounds of flesh in pots.

And once the course is run, he collapses against a tree in an empty field. The horizontal axis of the horizon contracts to a single point around that single living tree arching toward the sun, its roots gnawing their way to the center of the earth. He leans his ear to the trunk root, the broad point where the tree enters the earth, where the horizontal and vertical intersect, and hears the steady drum of the Great Heart surging blood through the universe. He knows that his only remaining trajectories are vertical—height and depth—for the energies of breadth and scope are expended.

IMAGINATION’S REALM

Imagination is the pure golden thread of mystery running through every deep, lifelong drive toward existential realization, echoed in the words of historical masters across domains. We witness it in Einstein’s decade of thought experiments, Thomas Merton’s transformative obsession with silence and the darkness of mystery, Sun Tzu’s elevation of war to art, and Jamie Winship’s remark that imagination is the “imaging forth of the unknown real.”

The long way of any creative master-in-the-making begins with submission to a body of knowledge and the leadership of a mentor, is worked out in practice and experimentation, and culminates in the freedom of a phenomenological and bodily knowledge that can express itself beyond the confines of accepted “rules.” It is a progression from what, to how, and why, and to what else.

We first learn the play book, and then we throw it out.

This is imagination’s realm. First to infuse the mundane with an elixir of magic, and then to envision a thing so deeply and in such detail that the lines of reality blur and then are redrawn, where the how of a thing supplants the what, and the what else begins to take shape in new forms, applications, or creative expressions. This is the learned art of contemplation, the activation of the intuitive mind, whether in prayer, science, athletics, or art, that enables the master to realize philosophical insight, material invention, feats of strength, or existential bliss.

It’s also how a man loses 50 pounds, a woman reinvents herself, and how a family survives tragedy. Imagination is Occam’s Razor, Noah building his ark, and the Trojan Horse. It’s running a mile in under 4:00.

Imagination pictures it (what)

Rational Mind organizes it (how)

Body actions it (do and become)

It was Joan of Arc’s imagination that made her the most badass Christian of all time; and Don Quixote’s painful journey of imagination, as an unadulterated spirit, that led him in the end to see things as they really are; and Hamlet’s lesson was one of a limited modern consciousness paralyzing a mind—by trapping it between the poles of imagination and practicality—to kill it in place.

CULTURAL OBSTACLES

In addition to, and largely as a result of, cultural materialist straight-jacketing, there seem to be obvious possibilities among modern cultural phenomena that stand out as potential culprits in the crimes against imagination.

One possibility is the usurpation of imagination through the displacement of imagined realities with virtual ones. Perhaps our creative muscles atrophy when we subsume, to the exclusion of self-directed fantasy, a ready-made digital fantasy world. Maybe it’s the reason why a boy who unplugged from his video game and was forced outside will return in ten minutes, claiming boredom.

Or, maybe movies have displaced active imagination. Moving pictures are the closest thing to dreams that we consciously experience. It was noted during the era of black-and-white movies and TV that avid viewers often dreamed in black-and-white as well. We spend hour upon hour and day after day staring at screens, from phone to computer to TV, enraptured by a digital fancy.

Eerily, the screens of today also look back at us, unnervingly reminiscent of the primordial abyss, into which you sometimes stare, and at others it stares back.

Or, the American cultural obsession with fame and luxury as our highest aim. At best, this appears to be a commercialized, one-dimensional, surrogate imagination marketed to the unimaginative. It is the irrational conflation first of comfort with basic necessities, and then of luxury with comfort. Lifestyles of the vapid and pampered. The American Dream is a myth.

Such mental clutter must contribute to shorting out our circuitry.

“In America, everyone finds facilities unknown elsewhere for making or increasing his fortune. The spirit of gain is always on the stretch, and the human mind, constantly diverted from the pleasures of imagination and the labors of the intellect, is there swayed by no impulse but the pursuit of wealth.” —Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

Or, the soul-crushing experience of our modern public education system, designed to create an obedient workforce, predictable citizens, and non-thinkers easily controlled through national narratives. We do not teach our children to think for themselves. Learning to think is a long and arduous course; the mind must be trained through rigorous exercises. Trained minds probe deeply into things, invent, solve real problems, create novel works, and are freed to imagine the impossible. A well-trained mind is easily confused with genius.

Our education system, including our universities, does not yield these kinds of minds today.

Or, the de-identification of our children through the psychological castration of boys in school and the popular vilification of men as belonging to a purportedly toxic subspecies, coupled with the simultaneous de-feminization of girls and the sexual commodification of women. The confusion of androgyny smells like delusion. Fear-based delusion cripples the intuitive mind.

We, each in our different genders, have been culturally curtailed from doing the one thing at which we might actually and naturally succeed, which is to simply function as we are.

If I am an acorn, perhaps the very best I can aim toward is to grow into an oak tree.

It seems that, having subjugated the natural world to our ravenous acquisitive appetites, our hunger has driven us to consume our own natures next. In such a mental morass and identity dysmorphia, it is sometimes difficult to imagine a more sane existence, or to imagine at all, so tightly does fear coil itself around, but it is nonetheless a combination of historical education and imagination that can liberate us.

Or, the way Western Christianity has reduced the Gospel message to scripted creedal utterances offered to the only kind of God of which we can conceive, a God made in our image, one who tortures his son to death on a cross, purportedly for “us”, but then in divine treachery condemns most of the human race to everlasting torment anyway. I picture this entire theology and its fundamentalist variants as a dystopian gameshow where contestants are provided inadequate information, put against a countdown clock, and frantically attempt to negotiate moving mechanical obstacles where a single slip or misjudgment results in the blood-spattered spectacle of grizzly death, dramatized on camera for a thirsty crowd. The one in a thousand contestants who manages to cheat death ascends to the show’s production level, folded into the crew that designs increasingly malevolent and undefeatable obstacles. The show must go on.

Where in this errant and reductionist theology is the mystery of God’s love and its inevitable reconciliation of all things? How do I love my doomed neighbor? Where is there room for imagination?

“The course that a free nation runs is from virtuous industry to wealth; from wealth to luxury; from luxury to an impatience of discipline and a corruption of morals; till by a total degeneracy and loss of virtue, being grown ripe for destruction, it falls at last prey to some hardy oppressor, and with the loss of liberty, loses everything else that is valuable.” —Ezra Sampson, 1818

I’ve no desire to simmer in the many disconcerting elements of our cultural stew, but to consider that maybe, given any number of constraints or restraints, tightening mental models, sheer ignorance, or institutional strictures, we find ourselves in a collective struggle to regain a form of imagination that has been crowded out, silenced by noise, made largely inaccessible to mushy, undisciplined minds, or buried in the avalanche of insubstantial and fleeting imagery that is the modern world.

REMEMBERING

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the Argentine master of short fiction, essays, and poetry, viewed imagination as a form of remembering what has not yet occurred.

Maybe we can clear the mental rubble, reach into the long line of humanity across the ages, and cling to the fine golden thread of mystery. Maybe in silence we can hear the Muses of old. Maybe we can quicken and remember.

Imagination is the faculty that allows finite beings to confront infinity, eternity, and the divine. It is the supreme human power; the ability to dream worlds into (provisional) existence, to multiply realities through mirrors and forking paths, and to navigate the infinite labyrinth of possibilities. It is neither purely escapist nor strictly instrumental. Instead, it is the medium through which we encounter the mysterious, the beautiful, the terrifying, and the absurd aspects of existence. Imagination does not merely reflect reality; it actively shapes, questions, and sometimes dissolves it.

Like Frodo says dreamily to Sam when they are about to die in the eruption from Mount Doom, “Here at the end of all things.” At the end of all things figuratively known, it feels like physical death looms. But the Hobbits do not die; they are rescued by eagles. The end of imagination always signifies the renewal of imagination; the end of one reality seeds the birth of the next. We are born and reborn during our lifetimes, the world made and remade, and the stories we tell are the memories of new stories not yet lived, seeing all things anew through the passing years, to remember what has not yet occurred, every breath drawing the substance of what we hope for, to become what we have never been and yet forever remain.

I went months without hearing a single song, long enough that I’d forgotten music altogether, unconsciously left it behind. The early days of Iraq. An enterprising young Marine covertly collected everyone’s digital music to build an illegal library on the operational shared drive, hidden in layers of obscure folders. I was one of only a few officers lucky enough to be read in, because the Lance Corporal Mafia does not trust “The Os”, with good reason. Just plug your earphones into your government laptop, follow the map, click any of 1,000s of songs and don’t get caught. Me sitting in the tactical operations center, watching battles on grainy feeds, tracking carnage, night-vision buildings evaporating into smoking holes, one ear plugged into my laptop and the other listening to radio traffic from the units.

Why can’t there be music in combat? One Marine unit assaulted an enemy position to the symphony of .50 caliber machine guns and AC/DC thumping in time with glorious effect. My first song, after a lifetime without a song: Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “November Rain.” A random choice, but rarely have I romanticized a song like that one. It was a gift, a message, a promise, a tattered letter from the past, and a prophecy, made sweeter by the fact that I was getting one over on the man. A magical machine to take me anywhere I wanted to go: to breathe beside my sleeping wife in the waking moments of the warm dawn, to walk barefoot across the cool lawn with my son on my back, to sit poolside with strong cold drinks in the sacrament of the sun.

I am there and I am here. The bleak realities of men hellbent on shedding blood must first be filtered through a sanitizing story before they can be memorialized. The carnage is too blunt for the unbaptized. Caught up in wartime fervor, the myth of ‘us and them.’ We cling to it long after its potency expires.

James Webb, Vietnam veteran, journalist, political advocate, and author, published an article in Parade Magazine that I have read every Memorial Day since 2001, a tradition started by my old friend The Night Clerk, when we were young Marine officers together, “The Price of Duty.” It tells the story of a devoted father, himself a WWII veteran, and his son, who volunteered for Vietnam. The Night Clerk sends me the article every single year, a few days before Memorial Day, without fail. In an act of enduring love, he will not allow me to forget.

In the summer of 1967, Troy Liverman took a photo of his son holding a sign that read “BEFORE.” There would be no “AFTER.”

The ragged colors still wave on the quiet battlefield. The survivors toast the fallen with tentative mourning, petrified to admit that they dare not ask the fateful question, for the unspoken answer known to every man is clear, during the wars of our lifetime:

It was not worth the price.

But action and passion demand a relentless surging forward. To stop in the midst, even for a thought, is to die in place. Caught in an ambush, tactically or existentially, the man’s only chance of survival is through it.

Adlai Stevenson requoted in the 1950s what was originally a 1920s advertisement written by George W. Cecil. Printed and framed, the paper yellowing at the edges, it was a gift to me when I was a young captain, unceremoniously handed over to me by a Force Recon Marine 1stSgt who simply said, “This is how it goes, sir.”

“On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.”

The story tells us that the soldier leaves the battlefield, that bloody place, and leaves that place in that place. He returns home to hoist his children in the air and spin around in joy, to take his pretty wife dancing, and to feel the satisfaction of having done his duty.

But the truth is that the man cuts chunks of flesh and heart from his own body and buries them on the battlefield. He claims heavy souvenirs to carry home in their stead. He leaves parts of himself in the fields of blood and brings parts of the battle home. It is a grisly trade made by men who deal in lead.

Home is no place for battlefield souvenirs. And the man is now incomplete.

The din of ‘homecoming’ quickly quiets. No more parades. A sheet of newspaper blows down an empty street where once throngs cheered, real or imagined.

The man wants to feel fully alive again; he longs to be home, and, at a deeper level, he longs to return there. So, he is not whole. He languishes in a space that is neither ‘this’ nor ‘that.’ He hates. His revulsion at the pretense of society turns to anger and self-pity, and from despair, he either self-destructs or rewrites his story as a romantic tragedy, that of the good-hearted hero with Shakespearean flaws.

Larry Lively, mentor to The Night Clerk in the early days, spent multiple tours in Vietnam working out a toast:

“Here’s to it, and here’s to it again; and damn the man who gets to it, for he may never get to it to do it again.”

On a day like Memorial Day, the man dusts off the myths of duty and patriotism. He remembers, relives, and silently wonders whether the life he lives pays homage to the brothers he has buried. Is he grateful enough? Does he remember often enough? Does his work mean anything? When’s the last time he called to check on his brother’s widow?

Am I alive enough to honor the dead?

Time doesn’t heal it. The years have a density that buries the most acute moments and muffles the cries of the most tragic. Time turns down the volume on a track that ceaselessly plays. No man can remember enough, because re-member-ing is the reassembly of parts into their original whole. To remember them is to try in vain to put together the parts forever lost, and it is to see the empty spaces that will never be filled. If the man is ever to live again, he must fill the empty spaces to complete himself. He will try with pursuit, ambition, adrenaline, sex, booze, a family he can scarcely keep together, movement, heavy weights to carry, repetition of a fiction he recites, clutching a season that has passed, the heroin of harrowing music on dark nights, the words he whispers when he thinks no one can hear him. But to truly fill the empty spaces, he must call on the very thing that keeps the memories alive, that unassailable resolve that twists hot in his chest, an echo in a canyon: brotherly love.

A recent conversation with friends: grief is the evidence of love, or it is love that has nowhere to go, or, in the case of Troy Liverman, it is love that plants a garden on a grave. The man must open himself to the beauty and mystery of brotherly love, that strange and singular bond forged when men work or fight or bleed together for a common purpose, a purpose that, when distilled into its essence, is always a form of love. It is this love he knows best. It will lead him to the garden where the man’s soul can embrace those brothers in his midst. They’ve gone before us, an advanced party, to survey and reckon the land until we join them. Because that was not the end, nor is this, for we shall march in rank forever, until the end of all things.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our collective ideal captures the fundamental elements of existence, unencumbered humanity, and reasoned volition toward what is good, for each of us and ours. You could render the ideal, as philosopher Dr. David Bentley Hart does in “The Experience of God”, as the conditions proper to the full exploration of “Being, Consciousness, & Bliss.” The ideal hovers venerated above the masticating reality of living in the systems our System creates, and we use it to varnish our moral turpitude and to justify our imperial acquisitiveness. I participate in and defend the very systems that perpetuate a descent into the slow death of slavery, at least at the visceral level of life, where the man lives his days, and where one by one those ideals are amputated, his horizon shrinking interminably toward a final flicker of light followed by darkness.

What now, once the myth of patriotic duty is worn threadbare by the cost of service, not merely in blood and treasure, but in the lost assurance that I both represent and embody that noble ideal? When the good man crosses the globe to fight a bad enemy, he often discovers that he is not merely capable, and not merely willing, to commit the type of violence he once relegated to his enemy, but he is emboldened with a kind of lust for it. The man discovers that an enemy acts on his home soil exactly as he would if invaded by a foreign army, regardless of their propaganda, their noble “reasons”, their empty promises to liberate him from the only life he’s ever known. Acting as the man would if in his enemy’s place, the man will answer him with a disproportionate violence he may never have imagined existed.

Who then is good? And who bad? It is apropos that veteran homecoming is referred to as “reintegration” by the institution; the government has a special knack for naming a thing the opposite of what it really is. For many, homecoming is the abject failure of integration, in degrees, that bifurcates a personality into two opposing views of oneself, one the dutiful citizen and the other the monster of the battlefield. Joker said it in Full Metal Jacket, responding to a question regarding the incongruity of a peace sign and the words “Born to Kill” on his helmet. It represents the “duality of man.”

The unwitting veteran is shocked and overwhelmed at his intrinsic duplicity, and becomes mired in a losing battle between “either/or.” To survive, he must realize that it is a whole human who is “both/and”, the citizen and the monster, the saint and the sinner. This is true integration and is the truth of us all.

Perhaps my gnawing sense of betrayal has less to do with unrequited wartime loss, in its personal and most encompassing senses, and more with filtering my experiences and those of others through the wrong lens.

When viewed through an ideological lens, it is painfully evident that our wars are not fought for such lofty ideals, and the cost is too high. But if filtered through a pragmatic imperial lens, it’s simply the cost of doing business on a global scale. Geopolitical manipulation, policed lines of communication, international footprints, and the dirty tricks of the intelligence space all help maintain the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, among other things, thereby creating the conditions we have enjoyed for several generations. We must have skin in the game to perpetuate the stunted education, entitled sloth, and distracted self-obsession of the American masses. Losing a few thousand of the martial class here and there seems a reasonable ante. Hell, it’s a staple tradition of the nation-state. This leads to an inevitable collapse, but in the meantime, the machine functions as designed. We could just call it what it is and dispense with the romanticizing. Mercenaries don’t need flags and fables; they simply need to get paid.

An ugly truth is better than a beautiful lie.

Life’s a game, and a long one;
Love’s a drink, and a strong one;
He stops to think, and he thinks so;
He barely blinks, but he shoots low.

There is redemption found at the primordial beginning, in the untwisted purity of spontaneously busting out the Running Man in the middle of the living room when the music comes on, before the ‘self’ obscures the ‘me’, before the ‘I’ crowds out the ‘we.’ My son did this very thing once, when he was young, to a song called “The Promise.” It was so pure and free that I burst into laughter and joined him. When I remember it now, it brings me to tears.

That is what it means to memorialize. We memorialize by infusing memory with myth and imagination. It is to curate the raw footage of memory with a soundtrack of meaning that defies reduction, suffused with an unnamed emotion that is at once laughter and tears, both noisy silence and peaceful clamor, grief and love.

The man can pick it up, and the man can lay it down. The meek of the scriptures may not be those without power, but those monsters who hold their power in check, operate as good citizens, and simply remain capable of doing what duty requires in dire times.

“Every time I pass Johnny Liverman’s grave in my strolls through Arlington, I think of son and father, father and son. I am thankful I lived to bury a father who had entered his dotage, and I pray that when I am a very old man, my son may likewise bury me. But always in my heart I will honor Johnny and the others like him, who got straight with themselves, who disregarded shrapnel and gunshot wounds and went back to finish the job. Who gave us everything they had. And who, as we grow old, will always be 19.”1

It’s always you and me; it’s always us; it’s always about the love of the man who will see it through to the end, regardless of cost, whether he ever gets to it to do it again.

I knew it was happening, I didn’t care, and I did nothing to stop it. That’s not entirely true. I did care, but I pretended like I didn’t. I’d become disenchanted with my life’s rhythm: fruitless plans, evaporating side-hustles, relationship reruns, and an old house sagging into decay around me. I convinced myself that grinding harder on the same tired tactics would fix everything. Instead, I burned out my nervous system running at terminal velocity, ignoring the smell of overheating circuits.

All gutters, no strikes.

So I hit the kill switch.

I got lazy. Stupid lazy. I got fatter, sicker, and more fragmented by the month. I made a rookie mistake of conflating one thing with everything. Exhausted, I shelved the very operating principles I’d lived and written about for decades. It was pathetic self-sabotage, the kind that short-circuits a man’s agency. I wrote a book about this exact trap, and I still fell into it. It sneaks up.

An unchecked amygdala can turn a grown-ass man into a six-year-old boy, one who has a meltdown at his birthday party because he doesn’t like the cake. A good mom exiles L’il Snoop to his room for the afternoon to contemplate gratitude and his own stupidity.

We all carry a six-year-old version of ourselves—the one who jumps in the pool fully clothed, dances at weddings, forgives quickly, and would ski off a 30-foot cliff just to see what happens. I love that kid. But he doesn’t get to drive the truck. When the inner child pitches a fit, the grown man has to step in. Sometimes he needs a hug; sometimes he needs a spanking. Wisdom is knowing which.

On my 54th birthday, I looked in the mirror and took stock. My dissatisfaction wasn’t about my circumstances. It was about how often I had chosen the path of ease, or avoidance, slowly eroding my own self-respect. I saw who I was becoming, and it filled me with white-hot fury, the kind that incinerates excuses.

The only appropriate response was to square that shit away: own it, lead, clean house, restore order.

First war; then peace.

But if not…

From somewhere in the caverns, I heard an echo, the faint ricochet of a primal voice.

In the Old Testament book of Daniel, three men faced King Nebuchadnezzar, who demanded they worship a golden statue (of him) or be burned alive.

Their answer was a lesson in resolve. “God is on our side. He will deliver us…

But if not, we still won’t bow.”

Zero negotiation.

The same spirit in each of us asks today whether we will compromise or stand.

‘Yes’ or ‘no’, not ‘maybe.’ Yes is hot; no is cold. Even God spits a lukewarm ‘maybe’ out of his mouth. It’s poison.

Maybe a little won’t hurt. Maybe I’ll start, or stop. Maybe it’s not that bad.

‘Maybe’ is water eroding rock.

What if…

David Goggins once asked himself, “What if...”

“What if a guy like me could be a Navy SEAL?” He was defeated, overweight, working an entry-level job he hated, and dared to imagine a version of himself that did not yet exist.

We each wear labels that keep us stuck. But what if...a loser like me, man my age, addict, bankrupt businessman, orphan, drunk, high school dropout, or the kid who was always picked last...could be that?

Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. What I’m describing is not the recruitment of willpower. Willpower alone is not enough to sustain directed effort over time.

Willpower burns hot and burns out. Imagination is nuclear.

Imagination, not willpower, bridged that gap between the realities of a sad, fat man on a sofa and a Navy SEAL. As Emile Coue de Chataignerie wrote, “When the imagination and willpower are in conflict, it is always the imagination which wins, without exception.”

We must envision and embrace our identities from our future, not our past.

The future is where we mine for gold.

Fat Goggins started running. His first day, he couldn’t run a single block and broke down crying. The next day, he ran it again. He ran it until the pain became fuel. He ran until they hammered the Navy SEAL Trident on his chest. The Goggins of today sets world records.

Now he runs so fast and so far that his demons can’t catch him.

The Line of Departure

Five weeks ago, I crossed mine. I started a Hard Routine — a long tradition of ruthless focus and strategic abstinence. I wrote about it 20 years ago in The CrossFit Journal. It’s a recalibration: doing more of what sharpens and less of what dulls. The term comes from the British SAS, who used “hard routine” to describe the tactical discipline crucial after crossing the line of departure. It eliminates the little things that compromise you and get you killed.

I do it because I can, while I still can. I do it for the brothers I’ve buried, those broken in combat, the forgotten, for those who never can again. I do it for those who have been so mind-fucked by lies and life-creep they can barely survive a typical day, so that I don’t become just like them. I do it for my 80-year-old self who will thank me.

As Prefontaine said, “to give anything less than your best is to waste the gift.” We squander too much in our lives, piss away opportunities, ignore people we love, consume and devour and horde, and forget to thank God for every scrap of grass-fed grass-finished reverse-seared steak we cram into our fat mouths.

The Hard Routine is a reminder to make the absolute most of what I take for granted.

I remind myself that I can go without and that I have everything I need for a life of joy and peace. It reminds me that a break is not usually what I need. More often, I just need to Harden TFU.

Paradoxically, it isn’t self-care, “me time,” or self-focused pandering in any of its popular, revolting forms. It’s the opposite. The spoiled child in me needs discipline, not coddling. A Hard Routine is self-denial and self-admonishment. Train harder. Learn. Reject time-wasting nonsense. Be silent. Submit to God. Give things away.

Stop pretending it’s OK when it’s not.

Its purpose is to intentionally attack my life the way a kid attacks a playground, not like a fat kid in a chocolate factory.

What now?

“What if” = visualization.

“But if not” = commitment.

Why sign up for a self-inflicted “Hard Routine?” Because, as Jim Wendler said, a mentally and physically dangerous man will always be needed.

To a world addicted to comfort, this mindset looks dangerous. It seems like “too much.” Danger looks like overkill. Good. A primed man operates at a level the complacent can’t fathom. He becomes more decisive, more resilient, generous, happier, and more alive. Your comfort with discomfort is discomforting to the uninitiated, and that’s exactly why we need more willing men. Because complacency kills people.

Mine didn’t storm the gates and overrun my position. It crept in, one shrug at a time, until I felt buried in concessions, bad habits, and depleted willpower.

I knew the way back. In a target-rich environment, take your pick and start assassinating.

A Hard Routine creates friction. Friction produces heat, the kind of heat that forges a “hell, yeah” when life asks if you want some.

A man willing to bleed to upset his status quo is dangerous. He finds life where he chooses to lose it.

I wake up like a man reborn.

I’m keeping a journal and building the program as I go. Working title: “Fit as Fkc at 54.”

More to follow.

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The road to rediscovery and reintegration was surprising. It had more to do with tapping into things I sucked at than leveraging existing skills.

I’ll begin at the end, which wasn’t the end but the moment something started to click, something new.

Discovering My Inferior Function — in a Kitchen

My “superior” functions are thinking and intuition. I live in my head: diagrams, strategy, problem-solving, philosophical rabbit holes. I read rooms and intuit vibes, what I’d call in military jargon “atmospherics.” My weak link? Sensing. I’m the guy who forgets his keys and phone while explaining to glazed eyes what order and chaos mean in the Yin & Yang symbol.

Then life threw me a curveball. After a full military career, I ended up running the operations for a handful of restaurants. Suddenly, I wasn’t just managing schedules and spreadsheets; I was chasing down busted refrigeration units, clogged drains, and mystery noises in the ductwork. I went from being the idea guy to the one with a wrench in his hand, standing ankle-deep in sudsy water at midnight. I was shocked to discover that I liked it.

At first, it was chaos. But here’s the thing: once I started using that neglected “sensing” muscle, it lit something up. Fixing stuff, no matter how improvised (“hillbilly engineering,” as my crew affectionately called it), gave a grounded satisfaction my usual cerebral work never did. It wasn’t about perfection; it was functional flow. If it worked and got us through another Friday dinner rush, that was a win.

What Makes People Tick

Many of us might like to better know what makes people tick — especially ourselves. But trying to decode human behavior can feel like decoding hieroglyphics.

Samuel Barondes’ Making Sense of People is one of those books that makes psych jargon sound like something you could actually use without a lab coat. Think of it like a street map for the mind. It’s not GPS-level precise, but it’s enough to keep you from driving in circles.

Barondes starts with the Big Five personality traits, also known as OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. They’re each basically the individual theme songs for how people show up in life. Are you curious or closed off? Reliable or messy? Chill or wound tighter than a catapult cable? Everyone lands somewhere on each scale. There’s no single label that fits, because most of us are a homemade mixtape.

Psychologists Paul Costa and Robert McCrae at the NIH took this idea and built the NEO-PI-R test, which breaks each of those traits into six smaller traits. That way, you don’t just get “extrovert” as a label; you get the story behind it. When you start noticing these traits in yourself (and, inevitably, in everyone else), the whole people-watching game changes. It’s no longer “why are they like that?” and more like “ah, I feel the beat they’re bumping to.” Tapping into your own or someone else’s rhythm simplifies interactions: you know better what to expect and can more accurately decipher reactions.

Barondes also dives into personality disorders, which are basically what happens when one of those traits turns the volume up to eleven and won’t fade back down. You’ve likely heard the labels before: antisocial, narcissistic, avoidant, compulsive, histrionic, and so on. Each is marked by its own flavor of distress or disruption in relationships.

If none of them ring a bell, maybe you’re just not ready to look in the mirror yet.

But the point of Barondes’ work isn’t labeling people as broken. It shows how understanding personality, biology, and habits can help us make smarter choices. It’s like reading a book about dancing: knowledge only matters when it turns into moves.

The Four Functions: A Different Kind of Map

If the Big Five are your horizontal map, like a city grid, Jungian psychology adds the vertical layers, like the subway tunnels beneath or the basements and attics in a big house. Jung saw four main “functions” in how we experience the world: Thinking, Feeling, Intuition, and Sensing. Thinking runs the logic; Feeling handles the vibe, energy, and atmospherics. Intuition sees patterns and connects dots; Sensing keeps us grounded in the here and now: taste, touch, smell, sound, sight, all the material that thinkers like to forget about.

Most of us get really good at one or two functions early on, and maybe recruit a third along the way for support. The problem is that our weakest function, the one we keep shoving to the back for decades, eventually starts banging on the door. That’s your “inferior function,” and it won’t be ignored forever. Reclaiming and integrating this function leads to the psychologist’s version of transformation. “Transformation” is most often reclamation. The natural state of the untended man is ruin. We allow ourselves, through 1,000s of indignities, to be formed by the world into something often both unrecognizable and detestable, a construct built for survival.

The inferior function provides clues to our elemental identity, who we were before “life”, and who, from the depths of our neglected shadow, we can salvage and reclaim. It is our truest self, the one God put on this earth to fight the demon hordes at Armageddon, the one who laughs at the khakied “yes man”, the hypocritical church member, the pandering husband, and the habit-slave decomposing on his couch.

We CAN reclaim what we are designed to be.

It starts by saying “no”, or lifting something heavy, or simply walking out and not looking back. No man who puts his hand to the plow, but who looks back, is fit for the Kingdom.

When you hit midlife and start side-eyeing convertibles or dressing like a teenager, that’s often your buried function trying to grab the mic. The long-ignored part of you suddenly wants a cameo, at the very least, but it sometimes throws elbows for lead vocals and launches equipment off the stage. It has a lifetime of unused power, and it can wreak havoc. Understanding this can reduce a midlife crisis from a fiery crash to a fender-bender.

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The Inferior Function and the Unlived Life

Robert Johnson, writing about Jung, called that neglected part “the unlived life.” It’s all the stuff we pushed aside: feelings we stuffed down, dreams we ghosted, talents we convinced ourselves we didn’t need. One day, they come back: louder, rawer, sometimes messy as hell.

If you’re a thinker, your feelings might ambush you at 3 AM. If you live in the body, your intuition might start throwing cheap kidney punches. Whatever side you’ve ignored will eventually demand stage time. Jung even thought that our deepest sense of meaning, the mystical stuff, lives in that neglected zone, which he called the shadow.

The sacred doesn’t sit in the polished, rehearsed parts of us; it hides in the unfiltered freestyle sessions.

So what do you do? You don’t fight it; you invite it. Give it space: a sitting room or a side venue where it can show up without wrecking the house. Let that weird, awkward energy become creative instead of destructive. Every time you stretch the part of yourself that feels clumsy or out of style, you’re quietly remixing your whole identity.

Exercising the Weakest Muscle

That season taught me something huge: your weak spot doesn’t have to stay weak. It’s just undertrained. Every time you practice the part of yourself that feels awkward — whether it’s expressing emotion, paying attention to detail, or trusting your instincts — you reclaim a piece of your own energy. You live less like a 2-D character and start becoming a full score instead of just the hook you’ve dropped your whole life.

Each of us has that unlived part waiting to jump back in the mix. The question is, do you keep ignoring it until it kicks in your back door, or do you invite it to your next pre-mission brief and give it a gun?

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There’s much more to it than this. For a more complete treatment, buy my field manual: Be a Boxer

Young lions strode the beaches then. I recognized their coming and going before I understood it, obscured by the bright spoondrift of absinthe. We watched through the clean glass windows, wondering silently at the great beasts, feeling a hunger akin to theirs.

One day, they were gone.

We still sat behind the glass in a tidy row along the bar. I stirred my drink with my finger and studied the empty shore. Sometimes the absinthe rode hard; it sparked and tilted the world on its side.

On a morning when the grey light turned sea and sand to silver, my vision drew tight as fog and collapsed into a tunnel. It rotated in the slow physics of a pistol barrel. I woke screaming an hour later.

The barkeep and the bouncer had followed protocol—dragging me into the surf. The briny air helped cure absinthe blacks.

I saw the sky first: an endless smudge of chalk above an ocean hammering the shore. I turned my head and found a paw print pressed into the sand, its edges sharp despite the tide. I traced the rim of it, a memory both tender and sinister.

Inside, the barkeep brewed what we called Blacklash—coffee so strong it could resurrect the dead. Steam rose in twisting funnels against the glass, hiding the faces behind it. Only hands around mugs and the dark blocks of torsos remained. I brushed the sand from my sleeves and went in.

The barkeep poured me a cup, holding it until both our hands wrapped around it. Three heartbeats, and his eyes told me everything he’d learned in sixty years across five continents. Then he turned and muttered Greek obscenities under his breath—his childhood language had no curses fierce enough.

The fans ticked time overhead. I thought of guns.

In my earliest memories, I heard bullets snap and felt sand in the creases of my toes. Sun on my shoulders, blood dried on my knees, the smell of warm sheets at dawn.

A cloud sailed across the sun and laid its shadow along the beach, turning foam to ink. It glided toward the horizon until it disappeared, but I imagined it—the shadow rolling over swells, black and weightless, like a sheet snapped open above a cold bed, settling silently.

The sand glowed white again. The last cold sip of espresso was gone. Through the glass I searched for the lion print and wondered if the shadow had filled it.

The young lions must have seen that shadow pass like a flying carpet, followed it into the sea, and swam out to meet it—to fly with it from one shore to another.

A Manual of Theosis: A Working Model of Stillness

The Practical Physics of Watchfulness, Stillness, and Prayer

I’ve come to believe that most human suffering has less to do with what happens to us and more to do with how we see. Perception determines, and even creates, experiential reality. The “eyes” of the body are easy enough to train — years of repetition, deliberate exposure to discomfort, the slow grind of building strength. The eyes of the mind, however, are blind by default. They feed on pleasant illusions and recoil from the truth.

I recently heard a story about a woman who visited a monastery for a silent retreat, an experience I’ve shared. Restless and distracted, she walked the grounds and encountered a monk sitting under a tree in the solitude of a frozen field. She walked toward him, observing his stillness, the heat of his breath visible in the bright, cold air, the world silent except for the crunch of snow under her boots. She asked him, “How is it that you sit so still, doing nothing, in the freezing cold?” The monk rose and put his hands on her shoulders, looking into her face with wide eyes. “Oh, young lady, you are the victim of a delusion that I am doing nothing. When we do nothing, we are doing the only something that there is. It’s how our spirits grow up.”

Friar Joshua Shooping, in A Manual of Theosis1, argues that the central problem of man is perceptual — we trust our senses as the totality of reality. The result is dependency on comfort, on stimulation, on feedback loops that keep the ego intact. The book presents what it calls a “manual,” but it reads more like field notes from a man who’s wrestled with himself long enough to see where the real war is fought.

It comes down to three disciplines: watchfulness, stillness, and ceaseless prayer. But before any of that can make sense, one must understand the disease these practices are designed to treat.

Creation itself, Shooping argues, is ordered toward one end: that man might share in the life of God, what the Church calls theosis—becoming “partakers of the divine nature” as Peter puts it. Union with God is not an abstract idea. It is the point of everything that exists. This is not poetic language. It is the basic operating assumption of the entire book.

The problem is that most of us live as if the opposite were true. We move through the world with our sensations, moods, and circumstances as our horizon of reality. A Manual of Theosis is, in effect, a technical document on how that goes wrong and how it can be reversed. It names the disease, exposes the mechanics, and then lays out the process: watchfulness, stillness, and ceaseless prayer as the practical means by which a man exits the closed doom loop of his own sensoriality and learns to live as intended, from God.

The Pleasure Principle: The Mind as a Closed System

Shooping begins with man’s basic existential dilemma: we were designed to take pleasure in God, yet in our fallen state, we seek infinite satisfaction from a finite, material world. The desire for pleasure itself is not the problem. It was created to be infinite and to regenerate in God. The problem is that this desire has been redirected—“bound up with pleasant sensations and feelings”—so that we now chase spiritual fulfillment at the sensory level.

He calls this “sensoriality”: an entire mode of life and worldview that lives from, through, and to the senses. In this posture, pleasure is automatically perceived as the successful fulfillment of life’s purpose, because the senses feel most agreeable in its presence. Pleasure becomes the metric, the rule by which everything is measured.​

From this misalignment arise the passions: disordered energies within the soul that darken the mind, misdirect the emotions, and confuse the will. They are not primarily “bad feelings” or moral infractions. They are the inner movements and compulsive motion of a desire originally meant for God, now misdirected toward “phenomenal reality in pursuit of ceaseless situational pleasure.”​

Shooping reduces the whole structure to two primary responses: lust (desire) and anger. Lust is the movement toward pleasure; anger is the movement against displeasure or the denial of pleasure. These correspond to pull and push—drawing in what feels good, pushing away what feels bad. Over time, these reactions become so ingrained that a man begins to mistake them for his identity. He thinks his likes and dislikes are himself.​

Scripture’s language for this cyclical paradigmatic enslavement is “the flesh.” Paul writes, “To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). Shooping reads this not as a threat hanging over us, but as a description of two incompatible modes of existence. To be “carnally minded” is to have one’s mind enslaved to sensoriality, to treat the fluctuating data of the senses as the ground of reality. It is death in motion: a life lived entirely in reaction to comfort and discomfort, cut off from the Source.

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The Pleasure Triangle: Desire, Pleasure, Pain

Shooping’s “pleasure triangle” is his most concise depiction of the fallen condition.​

1. Desire arises as a present lack—a kind of low-grade pain oriented toward future sensory pleasure and away from lack and its inevitable pain.

2. Pleasure is grasped, but only momentarily.

3. Because the desire that sought it is itself built of pain, the pleasure collapses back into dissatisfaction, re-initiating perceived pain and desired object-as-solution.

In this model, desire is “misery-in-action.” Even pleasure becomes a kind of pain, because once the pleasant sensation fades, the mind compulsively rehooks itself into the pursuit of its return. The cycle never resolves; it accelerates and escalates.​

This is what Scripture means when it speaks of sin as a condition, not merely as acts. “Sin” is a mode of being. It is “lawlessness” in John’s terms, the self operating as its own law and center (1 John 3:4), an inherently unreliable basis. Shooping describes pleasure functionally as “self-choosing, self-as-basis, or self-based choice,” the self as its own telos.​

The upshot is simple and devastating: “Irrational, unrighteous, sensible pleasure”—pleasure rooted in sensoriality as goal—is “the primary cause of suffering.” We are born into what he calls a “pain-affixed pleasure,” an inbuilt orientation that grinds us inexorably toward death.​

The Cross as Counter-Law

If the pleasure triangle is the law of fallen existence, the Cross is the introduction of a new law.

Shooping is very precise here: man does not need “better habits” to escape the wheel; he requires an alternate mode of being.​

On the Cross, Christ does something unbelievably concrete. He takes suffering—what the sensorial mind interprets as failure and loss—and redefines it. “Not my will but Yours” is the decisive break. Pain, which used to trigger renewed sensorial pleasure-seeking, now becomes, in Christ, the site of obedience, the doorway to union.​

Shooping reads Romans 8:6 (“to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace”) as a description of this new orientation. The Cross destroys the criterion of pleasure as the measure of success and introduces suffering “for the sake of righteousness” as the new basis for being. Suffering, then, is voluntarily refusing to fall into the stream of consciousness that drowns me in a sensorial worldview and to remain actively open to a divine paradigm. This constitutes a rebirth and subsequent reordering of my worldview. Death itself is repurposed: no longer the inevitable collapse at the end of the pleasure triangle, but the instrument of life.

This is not theoretical. In practice, it means that when suffering hits, a man trained by the Cross no longer reflexively seeks to drown it with sensory distraction. Instead, he can say, in effect, “This is not proof that God has abandoned me. This is the place where I surrender my will into His, where the old self’s pleasure-addiction is exposed and released.” That is the theologia crucis in lived form.​

Faith as Functional Perception

Here Shooping pivots to faith. Faith, he says, is “the principal factor determining one’s mode of viewing reality, which in turn determines one’s mode of action.” Faith is not merely content; it is a hermeneutic, a way of seeing.​ Faith is an organ that functions through understanding, as the eye functions through vision.

Paul says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The Greek term he uses for “things seen” is phenomena—things as they appear to the senses. Shooping’s point is that fallen man’s faith is already active; it is simply misdirected. He has faith in phenomena. He trusts the constantly shifting visible world as solid ground, and so his mind is “inescapably bound up with error.”​

Conversion, then, is not the creation of faith where there was none, but the reorientation of faith from the sensorial world to God:

• from changing phenomena to unchanging eternity,

• from creation to Creator,

• from fact to truth.

Paul’s exhortation, “reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:11), is the classic example. Shooping reads “reckon” as a call to reframe one’s self-perception on the factual basis of Christ’s work. A man in Christ is already in a new realm—“dead to sin” as a mode of being, alive to God as a new center. Faith’s task is to understand the truth, thereby to see and live from that reality.

Philippians 2:12–13 makes the same point from another angle:

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”

The command is not to work for salvation but to work it out—to bring into expression what is already possessed. God is the one who works in us “to will and to do.” Our “work” is to cooperate, to align. Shooping uses the image of medicine: we take it; it acts. It is not our effort that heals but the substance acting in us, received by faith.

In practice, this means a man begins to treat his reactions, impulses, and patterns as material for faith. Instead of viewing his anger, lust, or anxiety as final verdicts on his character, he reads them as symptoms of an old perceptual system and echoes of a “root delusion”—the sensorial worldview. Faith refuses to take these as the ultimate truth. It returns to the reality announced by God, and then acts accordingly.​

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The Work: Watchfulness, Stillness, Ceaseless Prayer

Shooping calls watchfulness, stillness, and ceaseless prayer “the essential tools of transformation,” not as religious ornament but as “a science of purification and enlightenment.”

They retrain attention, which is the spirit in motion.​

Watchfulness: Attending to the Passions

Watchfulness is “a continual process that attends to the presence and activity of thoughts, with the aim of their dissolution.” The goal is not to wage war on thoughts but to be aware of them as they arise, before the heart “enters into agreement” with them. One doesn’t battle thoughts by directing energy toward them, but by cultivating a dispassionate observation. There is a sequence to habituated enrapture by desire: a movement, then an unconscious falling into the stream, then the heart’s consent.

Watchfulness interrupts the sequence.​

In practice, this looks like this:

• A narrative, image, irritation, or thought appears.

• Instead of rushing into it, I note it: “There is anger or desire.”

• I refuse to merge with it. I watch it rise and fall.

This is metanoia at the tactical level. I am no longer confusing my being with my mental content. Over time, Shooping says, one experiences “a free space between personal being and the activity of thinking.” Paul’s phrase, “the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7), becomes less a slogan and more a description of this guarded space.​

Watchfulness of the Body and Breath

Shooping insists that worry and anxiety are “as much physical as mental.” The body is a “storehouse of subconscious negativity.” Romans 7:23 speaks of a “law of sin” in the members—principles encoded in bodily patterns.​

Watchfulness of the body entails systematically attending to sensations from head to toe, with awareness of tension, tightness, and restlessness. The body “does not lie,” he says; it “expresses the actuality of the state of the soul.”​

Breath becomes the hinge. Attention to the natural breath is “a sensitivity to the divine action of God giving, sustaining, and regulating man’s life.” Tying the Jesus Prayer to this breath (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”) allows the mind, body, and nous to converge.​

The inhale becomes an opening to Christ; the exhale becomes a surrender of will, felt as an intentional release of bodily tension. Over time, the breath slows; the mind quiets without becoming dull. This is where Jesus’ command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) moves from impossibility to method.

Prayer rides the breath.

Stillness: Surrendered Presence

If watchfulness is clearing the field, stillness is standing in it. Shooping defines stillness as “the quiet mind resting in the simplicity of one’s own being,” but insists it is not will-powered. The will does not force stillness; the will becomes willing.​

Isaiah 30:15 captures the principle: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” Returning and rest are the motions of metanoia: turning from scattered, sensorial orientation back toward God as center.​

Stillness acts directly on the body. Where watchfulness reveals tension, stillness releases it. The mind stores passions in “frozen flexions of the voluntary muscles.” As those let go, the inner storm calms. Though stillness encompasses the entire psychophysical being, this is not psychological quietism. Shooping warns against a trance-like passivity that dulls the mind. It is not stupor or euphoria that we seek. Authentic stillness is alert, God-facing, sacrificial. It is presenting the self as “a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1) in attention, not just in concept.​

In practice, stillness is what allows a man to sit with his pain, his boredom, his fear, without numbing or distraction—and to discover that beneath the agitation there is a deeper layer of being that does not shake.

Ceaseless Prayer: Integration of Life and God

Ceaseless prayer is the third pillar, “the activity of faith” that gives “total life continuity.” Prayer here is not occasional petition but a continuous turning of the mind Godward.​

Shooping gives simple instructions: find a place, set an intention to be attentive to God and self, begin with usual prayers, then invoke the Name of Jesus in rhythm with the breath, “watching and forsaking thoughts as they rise and fall.” Start with five to fifteen minutes. Extend only as stability is built. The counting of hours is of no use. The only real measure of progress is consistency over months and years.​

Philippians 2:12–13 again undergirds this: as we “work out” our salvation via these practices, we discover that “it is God who works in [us] both to will and to do.” Prayer is our consent; the transformation is His work.

Theoria and Metanoia: Seeing Through, Becoming New

When these disciplines take root, the mind becomes capable of theoria—seeing God’s truth directly. Shooping summarizes the core insights of this state around four pairs:

1. Impermanence – Providence: everything phenomenal is unstable; God’s providence is steady. Change itself becomes a sign of His care, not a threat.​

2. Suffering – Contentment: circumstances are not identical with contentment. Paul’s “I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content” (Philippians 4:11–13) becomes experientially intelligible.​

3. Apophatic Self – Being in Christ: no thought or feeling of self is the self. The true self is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). Poverty of spirit is the recognition that who I am cannot be found in my own narrative but in my union with Christ.​

4. Effort – Grace: human techniques cannot effect fundamental change; effort is a response to grace, not its cause. Transformation is experienced as God’s energy acting in one’s depths.​

Metanoia, in this light, is not one moment but an ongoing movement: away from sensual perceptual orientation, toward God as the new center of gravity. It is both crisis and process, a hinge and a path.​

In practice, all of this resolves into something deceptively simple:

• I no longer treat my sensations and circumstances as the final word on reality.

• I train attention through watchfulness, stillness, and prayer.

• I allow Scripture’s descriptions of what is true—dead to sin, alive to God; carnally minded is death, spiritually minded is life and peace—to become the lens, not another layer of intellect superimposed on a dysfunctional system.

The gap between theology and experience begins to close. Faith becomes functional. The old pleasure triangle loses its grip, not because pleasure disappears, but because it is no longer god. The true self learns to relate to creation and the “facts” of the sensorial world more skillfully and freely. The mind learns to stop orbiting itself.

Union with God, then, is no longer a distant abstraction. It becomes the practical reorganization of perception and desire around the One in whom, as Paul says, “we live and move and have our being.”

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Mind Over Matter.

The Marines taught me that doing anything hard was “Mind over Matter: if you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” My external environment doesn’t dictate my experience. Mindset does.

I have no credentials to write about mindset. But I know its power firsthand. I had a midlife identity crisis that torched a marriage, a career, and, seemingly at the time, all future prospects. As bleak as the world looked, the truth was much more forgiving. I had to change my mind to find a new way.

What stands in the way of change in a person’s life is not “matter”—material lack of time, resources, energy, external support, or motivation. What stands in the way are Mental Fortresses, what old English might call strongholds. These are the deeply entrenched patterns of thought, belief, emotional response, and behavior that resist novel knowledge or ideas that challenge what I believe to be true, even when they are not. I am most unaware of those that run deepest.

These are the silent governors of my life. They are the questions to which I might answer, “That’s just how I am.”

What keeps me from walking a path in my best interest is not because I can’t walk another, but that I’ve been “this way” for so long that I can scarcely remember being any other way.

Habits—of intellect, emotions, or behavior—are just habits, not identity. My habits are not who I am, but they create the reality I live. For the deepest patterns, marshalling raw willpower to disrupt them is futile. The battle begins and ends in my mind. This is a simplified outline of the process I used to rewire myself.

• First, mentally accept a new belief (~vision) as possible and continually contemplate it.

• Second, begin to act as if it were already true.

• Third, as my mind contemplates and my body activates in accord, the truth of who I am or could be rewires my neurological pathways—the programs that run me.

• My external environment is irrelevant. Visualize, intend, and resource.

A neurological maxim: what fires together wires together.

Repeated physical expression forges a neurological network that grows toward automation of that expression. In time, it creates what I’ve heard called “discipline without discipline.” I become hardwired.

Beliefs about myself govern my actions. Understanding this resembles an archaeological dig.

I confuse symptoms with root problems.

• For an addict, drinking, using drugs, or gambling appears to be the problem. Drinking and using cause problems, but they aren’t the problem. The problem is an overwhelming dissatisfaction with themselves and ignorance about who they are and why they’re here. An addict will do anything to simply feel different.

• In Genesis 3, Eve eats the fruit from the forbidden tree. Her “sin” appears to be that she ate the fruit. God told her not to eat it, but she did anyway, and so she sinned. Standard Bible school wrap-up. But was that her sin? Is the problem that she ate the fruit? No. The problem was that she thought God was holding out on her. She believed a lie and decided to take matters into her own hands. The sin was believing the lie. The symptom of that belief was the bite she took.

• My resentments toward life appear to be a problem for which others are to blame. In truth, a man’s vague depression is self-resentment. I spend my life conforming to society and don’t know who I really am. Since I don’t know who I am, I say ‘yes’ too often and ‘no’ too seldom. After years or decades, regardless of measurable success, the sheer mediocrity of my presence feels pointless. I begin to resent my life and the people in it because I feel trapped, stupid, and vapid. I’m an imposter. The last place I look to understand this feeling is in the mirror, because I’ve been working my ass off. Don’t I get credit for that? Confusion. Malaise. Anger. F*kc it, I’m out.

The truth is that my resentments don’t build because other people don’t act right. Nor are they righteous indignation against a system that’s rigged to keep me down. I teach others how to treat me and resent them for it: spouse, boss, kids, friends, and family. I sell out. I sacrifice things I care about, trying to be reasonable, trying to be “good”, amputating pieces of my agency one digit and limb at a time.

My resentments are symptoms of my lack of self-respect.

Resentment breeds anger. Together in time, they recruit hatred, mix a cocktail of contempt, and calcify into bitterness. My body knows the truth. It directs the anger inward toward its root and mutes all forms of joy. It becomes impossible to en-joy the things I once loved the most. Anger turned inward is that vague, depressive feeling. The solution is not to “let it go.” Passive release does not disrupt the pattern. I must take stock and begin to quietly demand of myself the relational behavior of someone I respect. Unfed, the twisted vines of resentment simply wither in place.

Free of bitter overgrowth, a man can do what strong men do: lift others up.

I Fear the Truth of Simplicity

Mark Twight, writer, founder of Gym Jones, and trainer of the movie 300 actors, said something like “simple works but complicated is easier to sell.” This sums up the multi-billion-dollar self-help and improvement industry.

To complicated, add novelty to complete the picture. A culture of consumers can’t resist the lure of a New Thing, a New Program, a New Hack. Leaping from one thing to the next derails consistency, preventing any improvement and creating a fragmented environment a mile wide and an inch deep. This is echoed in complaints like “I’ve tried every diet imaginable, and none of them work.” That’s because diets don’t work. I know it, but I keep dieting to get credit for trying. It’s like repeatedly cutting a board and being dumbfounded that it’s still too short.

My untended mind complicates simple truths, fragmenting around a constellation of competing options. It’s a road to nowhere.

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I am Pathologically Impatient

Someone can sell me a complicated secret success formula for $1,000 if they promise it will deliver results in 30 days. I won’t pay $1 to hear “do these three things daily for the rest of your life, and it will solve 80% of your problems.” It’s the daily and the rest of your life that scares the shit out of me. It feels impossible. I can barely make it to work on time, how am I supposed to do that every day forever?

The average American, like me, can’t conceive of implementing a daily practice starting now and continuing until they die. It speaks to my constitutional and cultural short-sightedness, my inability to make a hard decision and stick with it once the fervor of motivation fades.

Jim Wendler says discipline beats motivation. If I can stick with one thing long enough, it will teach me to stick with other things. Masters do one thing better than anyone else, and to the exclusion of everything else. An average dude like me will doubtfully ever master any one thing. Nor does that interest me, because so many things are interesting. I can learn to set my mind on something and see it through. I can begin eliminating what doesn’t matter and focusing on what does.

Several years ago, I started getting up an hour earlier to read. It wasn’t part of a life strategy, and I set no goals around it. I had a stack of books I wanted to read, but I was too tired after work. So I set my alarm. What developed was a love for the silent hours of the morning. Now, I can’t imagine not getting up early. It’s harder for me to sleep in than to get up, and I feel like I missed out when I do.

Getting up earlier is one thing that has created space for many things. It has made me unexpectedly more patient, simply because I know I have a block of time to devote to whatever I’m curious about. If I want to read, write, train, or learn to pray, I’ll do it then. The rest of the day can be whatever it is. No rush.

What Works: Emancipate and Realign

For the seed of change to take root, I must first emancipate myself from the need for abstract societal acceptance, while cherishing my deepest connections, and, second, shift toward acceptance by something else. This requires foremost identification and confrontation with specific fears. This can take work. But skipping this step means you might as well skip the rest because nothing will work.

I must realign toward an ideal, an idea, or a vision that eclipses everything else. From that, reorganizing my life around that idea as a new center of gravity is necessary.

1. Identity. We have two identities: original and cultural. Each function relationally informs me about who I am and where I fit in. Our cultural identity is the one we all know, because it’s the one we present daily to “fit in.” Our original identity has often been lost in the layers of life, but it offers the truest sense of purpose, the “I was made for this” feeling of doing what you were designed to do. Personal agency is tied directly to identity. Return to the beginning and rediscover who that is, before you were afraid.

2. Take Stock. Your habits are not who you are, but they create your reality. Think about how you are now and what your life is like, the best and worst. How was it 10 years ago; how will it be 10 years from now? I had to evaluate where I had mistaken unconscious thoughtlessness for fate, or “getting older,” or “being busy.” I realized I had some habits to undo. It took time to develop bad habits, so I gave myself time to correct them, one at a time. Patience is the key to consistency, and consistency is the key to everything.

3. Cultivate imagination and vision. Take a solid block of time, even a day, to envision the “kind” of life you’d love to live. Imagine everything about it. Most importantly, imagine how you are, what you’re like, how you interact with others, and what that looks, sounds, and feels like. Simply put, I want to be the “kind of guy who…” Compare this vision to your current life. The gaps reveal the problems. I can only fix what I know is a problem.

4. Set Your House in Order. The process of transformation is Order—Disorder—Reorder. Transformation occurs when we aim for a new ideal and make it the center of gravity for our lives. From the status quo (the current order), we dismantle the rhythm of our lives, including its habits, patterns of thought, and behavior. This creates disorder. The realignment of our daily lives around a new center of gravity is the reordering. A new order creates a new life.

5. Live the life “that person” lives to become “that” person. If I endeavor to stand with men and women whom I admire, I must endeavor to make myself fit company. This is backward planning, what military strategists employ to envision an “end state”—a vision—and plan in reverse to arrive at the next steps and following phases that lead to that vision. Do not confuse this with goal setting. Goals are tactical next actions, daily things. Reorientation of my life is strategic, big picture, the curation of a lived life that results in a general existential nature. Simply, I want to become “like that.”

6. Burn your report card. Stop keeping score and forget everything you know about “progress.” Stop measuring yourself. Never say you should do anything. Should tells you that you’re supposed to be doing something, that you’re not doing it, and that you ought to be ashamed. You’re good, but, like all of us, you might have a little work left to do.

7. Serve Others. The best thing I can do for myself is get over myself.

What Works: Operate by Principles

Principles work like this for me: there are only a few that matter, and I have to abide by them over time to embody their truth. If I abide, things get better. If I don’t, there are consequences. Before I will abide, I must believe or at least muster enough faith to persevere long enough to gain bodily experience. Most often, experience is not the result of sufficient faith; experience creates faith.

I start doing something, benefit from it, and start to believe.

Principles never change. I change and, as I do, unlock the layers of depth intrinsic to the principles. I change when I do something consistently. I’ve only cultivated a couple of personal habits consistently for a long time: lifting weights and reading books. Everybody has their thing. Both have taught me principles I now consider vital: lifting, that consistency is a prime variable; reading, that to live well, we must continually learn. Neither has an end; each has its application.

Principles are often deceptively simple. They are easy to understand but require a lifetime of practice to embody.

• Othello, the American version of Go, the Chinese strategy game that’s akin to 3-dimensional chess, keeps the motto “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.”

• Someone can learn the fundamental principles of strength training in under 60 minutes and benefit quickly from consistent application. But it takes years of practice to master the strength skill.

• The same applies to writing, relationships, cooking, shooting, most trades, Stoicism, guitar, or religion.

In short, I identify one good thing, do it, and mitigate distractions or hindrances. This is the center of gravity around which I organize my life, or parts of it. Once I’ve envisioned what “that” looks like in detail, I have a filter for evaluating everything I do and don’t do toward that end.

With such a mindset, things naturally begin to sort themselves out. There’s no pressure, no performance, and no pretending. It’s like how I don’t “try” to get strong or lose weight, I simply lift weights or don’t eat sugar, and my body takes care of weakness and fatness on its own.

What I sense so often in the silence is not to worry about tomorrow. I may not be around to see it. If I’m not alive tomorrow, I’ve wasted today caring for something that does not belong to me.

I’ll stick with today and act like I’m already the guy I’m not yet.

If you found any of this content useful, check out similar posts, my book Be a Boxer: Not a Fencer, or consider sharing:

Strength—physical and mental—is not an aesthetic choice. It’s a survival strategy and a moral duty. Your life is on the line. When I learned what’s at stake, I learned that I owe it to both myself and the people I love to do what I can. Most people want to “feel better” or “look better.” But few are willing to get sore to get strong, and strength is the point.

Resistance training is vital to longevity and quality of life. The strength it produces also makes you harder to kill.

Stronger People Are More Useful

In garages and warehouse gyms around the world, rough men and women train in silence. They don’t care about Instagram angles. They care about being useful when it counts. They move heavy things, week after week, because they understand a simple truth:

It’s not ego, it’s utility. The point of lifting heavy things is to keep lifting heavy things. Life is full of heavy shit. Those who can lift what needs lifting matter more to the people they love most than those who can’t. I need strong people in my life that I can count on, lean on, and who will tell me the truth I need to hear. Strength training is a dance between mindset and physical effort that develops both. The mind feeds the body, and the body feeds the mind.

Strength coach Mark Rippetoe said, “Stronger people are harder to kill and more useful in general.” That line lives rent-free.

The Day My Mother’s Hip Snapped

My mother didn’t fall and break her hip.

Her hip snapped as she stood at the sink. Then she fell.

That detail matters. Her bones failed her before gravity did. That image—her just standing there, then crumpling—burned into my mind. It was a slow-motion car wreck I watched in hindsight, knowing it didn’t have to end that way.

The common condition of aging in our culture—frailty, fear of falling, slow decline—is not inevitable. It is, to a large extent, preventable. Strength training guards against the quiet disasters that show up suddenly and “out of nowhere.”

Heavy lifting densifies bones. Bone mineral density (BMD) correlates with longer and healthier lives. Higher bone density is a marker of overall health sustained by nutrition, physical activity, and good metabolic function. It reduces fracture risk, of course, but also reduces complications like immobility, infections, and reduced quality of life.

Older men, in particular, are at significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all-cause mortality with each standard deviation in lower BMD. Combined with low muscle mass, the negative effects are compounded.

The bottom line is that low bone density and muscle mass accelerate aging and systemic degeneration. You not only die earlier, but your quality of life gets worse and worse.

Resistance training helps prevent an otherwise inevitable decline.

The beauty is that “resistance” training is scalable. I put my mom on a program where she did three sets of five repetitions throughout the day, simply sitting in a chair and standing up. She was in no condition to lift weights. We scaled the training to her capability and pushed the envelope a little. Each week, we added another repetition. As long as she continued, she grew a little stronger each week.

Strong Bodies: Training as Armor

In addition to utility and BMD, weightlifting is strongly linked to neurobiological health, supported by high-quality scientific research. Consistent training can literally slow or reverse the aging process and prevent cognitive decline.

Hard training teaches your nervous system that strain is normal. When you voluntarily put a bar on your back, or pick a heavy object off the floor, you are rehearsing for the day life doesn’t ask for your consent. Resistance training promotes neurobiological factors critical to neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons. It increases blood flow to the brain and supports the hippocampus — the region central to memory and learning. Lifting weights literally makes you smarter.

At the practical level:

• Doing hard things makes everything else seem easier. After a brutal set of deadlifts, a difficult conversation or a long workday feels less dramatic.

• Physical fitness is one primary line of effort in a larger personal campaign. The discipline, structure, and progression you use in the gym transfer to work, relationships, and problem-solving.

• Strength is a visible, tangible feedback loop. The bar either moves or it doesn’t. 200# is always 200#. The bar never lies. That honesty is rare and valuable.

This isn’t about chasing six-pack abs or gettin’ swole. Your body thrives on the stress of lifting and moving heavy objects. It fuels your body’s systems. It’s also about becoming the kind of person who can carry weight—literal and figurative—without shattering.

Consistent training teaches me how to work for something I want.

Elitism vs. Excuses: You Don’t Deserve Equal Outcomes

In In Defense of Elitism, William A. Henry III draws a sharp line: equality is not the same as egalitarianism. Equality means everyone gets a spot on the starting line. Egalitarianism insists everyone crosses the finish line together.

Not everyone deserves the same outcome.

Outcomes are earned through effort, natural ability, and disciplined dedication.

Uncomfortable calculus:

• People who work harder deserve more than people who don’t.

• Smarter people may navigate life more easily than those who are not as sharp, but raw talent alone doesn’t guarantee success. Nobody is owed anything.

• Grit (perseverance) beats talent often enough that it should embarrass the gifted who refuse to work.

With the drugs available in America today, anyone can buy skinny. But you can’t buy strong.

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If I want to stand in the company of men and women I admire, I must live the kind of life that makes me fit company. If you work harder or smarter longer than I do, you are better than I am. We accept this in sports and the military, where “elite” performers are celebrated.

What most people miss is the sheer amount of unseen sacrifice it takes to be that good at anything. The same is true for getting strong. I have to earn it. There are no shortcuts and no magic pills.

I either pay the necessary price or I don’t get to have it.

Why Train? Teeth Sharp in a Soft World

Jim Wendler, a strongman, author, and brutally honest coach, answered the question “Why train?” with a list that cuts through all the fluff. Paraphrased, some of his reasons include:

• To challenge yourself mentally and physically.

• To develop the bite that carries you through hard times.

• To keep your teeth sharp in a world obsessed with “easy.”

• To learn that actions and inactions both have consequences.

• To avoid becoming a fat, weak, ignorant example to the people who watch you.

• To exhaust your body and mind enough that you can tolerate the weak, the foolish, and the entitled.

• To learn self-reliance.

• Because a mentally and physically dangerous man will always be needed.

These reasons aren’t poetic. They’re blunt. They frame training not as a hobby, but as preparation—to be someone other people can count on when things go sideways.

Stronger Minds: Stoicism Under Fire

Stronger minds are more useful than weaker ones. Rational minds beat irrational ones.

Vice Admiral James Stockdale, a U.S. Navy fighter pilot, was shot down over Vietnam and spent seven years as a prisoner of war in the “Hanoi Hilton,” five of those in solitary confinement. Before his capture, he had been auditing philosophy courses and encountered the Stoic teachings of Epictetus, a former Roman slave who was beaten, tortured, and later freed.

Epictetus taught that there are only two categories in life:

1. What you can control.

2. What you cannot control.

The list of things you truly control is short. Your control ends at your own skin. Your body. Your choices. Your responses. Everything beyond that—other people’s behavior, outcomes, recognition, ridicule—is outside your control. You can influence some of it, but you can’t command it.

When your happiness depends on someone else behaving a certain way, you are practicing premeditated disappointment. Irrational desire is a contract you sign with yourself to stay miserable until the world obeys your wishes.

Freedom begins when you accept the world’s indifference and focus ruthlessly on what you can control. That includes:

• Your training: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

• Your discipline.

• Your attention.

• Your willingness to release everything else into the hands of God—or at least out of your clenched grip.

Your job is to inhabit a simple state: I am. It is. I have my hands full with the few things I can control. The world will spin without my judgment or my attempts to micromanage it.

Consistent training under load teaches me this lesson, over and over. Willpower is not enough to move something I’m too weak to move. If I don’t respect the limits of my capability (the extent of my control), I get hurt. I can only do what I can do. To move something heavier, I have to become someone different.

Leadership in Hell: Stockdale’s Code

Inside the Hanoi Hilton, torture, starvation, disease, and humiliation were constant, but that’s not what ultimately killed many American prisoners.

They were trained to give only name, rank, and serial number. When they broke under professional torture—as any human eventually would—they drowned in shame and guilt. Once they lost hope and self-respect, they died of broken hearts. Their will to live collapsed.

The chain of command remained. Stockdale was the senior officer. He rewrote the Code of Conduct for captivity to preserve his men’s dignity. He created:

• A clear standard: you will resist as long as you can, then give as little as possible. If you break, you come back, and you try again tomorrow.

• A covert communication system that allowed prisoners to stay connected and support each other.

• A culture where they were part of something larger than themselves, where contribution, respect, and love were still possible.

Stockdale lived by his own code. When the Vietnamese planned to use him in a propaganda film as proof of humane treatment, he smashed his own face with a three-legged stool so they couldn’t put him on camera. He carried a limp for the rest of his life from repeated torture and was awarded the Medal of Honor after his release.

One Christmas, while he was locked in solitary confinement, other prisoners mopped the floor outside his cell in a deliberate rhythm. In Morse code, they swabbed the same message over and over:

We love you.

That’s what a strong mind and a clear code can do in hell: it can keep people alive, proud, and connected. The sometimes relative hell of our daily lives is no different.

Pay the Price

The world does not care how you feel. It responds to who you are.

If you want to be the kind of person who survives hardship, leads under pressure, and stands upright while others fold, you need the following in direct proportion to the challenge:

• A stronger body.

• A stronger mind.

• A code you refuse to break.

• A brotherhood.

You already know who you want to be.

Are you willing to pay the price?

If any of this struck a chord with you, please consider sharing it. Thank you.

Two of the most counter-productive words in the English language are “try harder.” We think that the reason for our perpetual failure to reach simple goals—or to manage behavioral issues—is because we don’t try hard enough. Oh, if I only had more discipline (or clarity or motivation or support), we might complain, as if these are things we’re either born with or can possess like a magical talisman. If I had “that” maybe I could keep promises to myself. If I had “that” I could be “good.” If we’re already doing our best, trying harder solves nothing.

The result of this mindset plunged me into three years of talk therapy courtesy of the Veteran’s Affairs Department. That’s like 200 hours of professional therapy, plus homework. My therapist was an interesting dude with a spooky background. He had the sort of backstory that made me wonder if he was analyzing me or plotting my role in his next plausibly deniable mission. I both enjoyed and learned much from our weekly talks and the many books on psychology and philosophy that I read. He was brilliant at providing mental models instead of solving tactical problems. He gave me tools instead of answers. It launched me onto a relentless self-improvement path that morphed into an exhausting treadmill. When does it end?

What I’ve learned is that what you can change and what you can’t fall into three distinct categories, discussed below.

From what I see posted, it seems that a lot of people are fatigued by the cultural sentiment that you’re never good enough. It’s strange how silence sharpens your vision—quiet the noise, and clarity floods in. With good intentions, I triangulated in a self-help matrix of ambient dissatisfaction, relentless measurement, and a “not enough” mindset that strips the joy out of living like a distracted mom shushing kids at the park so she can scroll in peace.

I was perpetually ramped up trying to optimize across domains for increased physical dominance, psycho-philosophical sage flex and spiritual wizardry. Don’t tempt me with dessert, fiction, or a nap—I don’t have time for that. Of course, my idea of a wild night was meditating on my protein intake while staring at the ceiling, wondering if existential dread burns calories. Once I was done raising my inner child, setting personal records on every lift, stacking enough wins and transcending, I figured I’d take half a day off to celebrate with a rice cake and glass of fancy water, the kind with bubbles. Because nothing says ‘enlightenment achieved’ quite like fizzy water and a rice cake—the feast of champions. I had to give it a break, man.

Of course, being healthy is better than not being healthy, having energy is better than not, and the capacity to simply get things done is bedrock. There are plenty of things anyone can do to make things better. In the case of truth and consequences, both are hard. Lifting weights is hard and so is the slow, debilitating onset of systemic weakness. One is “good hard” and the other “bad hard.” One is hard now, the other hard later. I get to choose.

But we can spend so much time improving our lives that we forget to live them. “Never enough” becomes a joyless slog. The point of getting better is to enjoy it, not compare it to the next level. Professional athletes train hard so they can play better. I can view my life the same way. I can choose hard things and face hard truths so I can live better.

What? So what? What now? (Credit: “Tugboat” Evans)

What follows is an inventory of what has worked for me and what has not during years of trying to get “better.”

You can read the bottom line below to get the short version, and I’ll leave you with a suggestion I’m currently exploring:

• LESS self-analysis, body composition concerns, theology, non-fiction, naval-gazing and trying harder.

• MORE cooking, lifting heavy things, running up hills and walking down, fiction, sunlight, silent prayer and phoning a friend.

The Bottom Line: Effective Mental Models

• I’ve come to realize there’s no self-worth scorecard—I’m not some child scrambling for gold stars on a life test. Modern capitalist culture has conflated human worth with productivity, a dehumanizing deception. If someone equates my overall worth directly with my productivity (boss, pastor, spouse), I turn down the volume on their noise or cut the power.

• I believe we’re good—deep down, inherently equipped to live fully. If I never added another 10# to my deadlift, stacked any more cash, or unearthed another philosophical gem, I’d be just fine for a kick ass life. Heaven forbid I settle for ‘good enough’—I’d probably wake up one day realizing I’ve accidentally enjoyed myself.

• Seneca said something like the object of praise is unchanged by praise, the object of ridicule is unchanged by ridicule. Failure’s lessons sharpen my functionality; success amplifies the best and worst of my true nature. But these remain externals—neither success nor failure alters who I am.

• Mindset. Most of what’s good is the absence of something bad. Before I try to get better at anything, I’ll make significantly more headway by first emancipating myself from destructive beliefs, thoughts, and habituated behavior.

• Whatever “it” is, we already have it. We are born with it. Look up, tap in, step forward.

Since psychology and philosophy got me here, a deeper dive follows. Psychology says we’re fragmented or broken and that a reintegration of self will cure it. Philosophy promises that our perceived dividedness can coalesce with a paradigm shift. Self-help directs us toward the optimization of integers toward improvement of the sum.

The Limits of Psychology

First, not every quirk needs a label or a fix. Thank God or I’d have been in therapy forever. In fact, very few do. Idiosyncrasies don’t make you pathological they make you human. Only to the extent that such idiosyncrasies create dysfunction do they warrant careful attention or treatment. Typically, we can just reign our weirdness in enough so that we can keep a few friends and function at work.

Second, modern psychology fails when it attempts to couch spiritual problems as biological ones and promotes languishing in problems as the cure for them. Substack’s own @lauralondon nails it better than I could:

Modern psychology offers a conceptually impoverished framework of suffering. The medieval Christians understood acedia, despair, demonic oppression. They had technologies for fighting them: asceticism, confession, community. We decided all that was superstition, reduced it to serotonin, and wondered why our depression rates keep climbing. Regression disguised as science. Modern therapy’s greatest trick was convincing us that understanding our wounds would heal them. As if cancer is cured by staring at the X-ray.

Our bodies and minds heal by design. Reliving trauma does not heal it. Where you find wounds that won’t heal you will discover lies. The lies we believe about ourselves and how the world works reopen such wounds. Only truth enables healing. It’s sometimes a simple epiphany. A teacher called you “stupid” in second grade; you remember it and realize you’ve felt stupid your entire life, and it’s kept you from trying. Then a friend says you’re one of the smartest people they’ve ever met, and you realize they’re telling the truth. Everything changes in an instant. Serious trauma and tragedies, of which I’ve had my share, warp perception proportionate to the wounds. No matter the depth of the injury, it is truth that frees me from it.

Third, at the clinical level, Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D.’s book “What You Can Change and What You Can’t” is a breakdown of ground truth on what works and what doesn’t in self-improvement and psychological treatment.

Seligman’s Bottom Line. Environment plays a part but is incomplete. Based on best evidence, the bottom line is that:

1) You can change some things easily.

2) You can change some things to some degree with a great deal of effort.

3) Some things you cannot change. We must “know what about ourselves will not yield ... Much of successful living consists of learning to make the best of a bad situation.”

Here are some facts about what you can change:

Panic [and daily anxiety] can be easily unlearned but cannot be cured by medication.

Our moods, which can wreak havoc with our physical health, are readily controlled.

Depression can be cured by straightforward changes in conscious thinking or helped by medication, but it cannot be cured by insight into childhood.

Optimism is a learned skill. Once learned, it increases achievement at work and improves physical health.

Here are some facts about what doesn’t change:

Dieting, in the long run, almost never works.

Kids do not become androgynous easily.

No treatment is known to improve the natural course of recovery from alcoholism.

Reliving childhood trauma does not undo adult personality problems.

For the things in our lives we cannot change, coping mechanisms serve us better than a futile search for cures.

What Worked for Me in Psychology

1. Identity. Excavating root causes and finding the original, unburdened, untwisted and unacculturated version of myself reveals to me my true identity. This is the kid who was me before life got involved. That kid just wanted to jump his bike off the biggest ramp he could find or read books. This got me to the bottom of how I’m built and how I’m designed to operate. The beauty of the original identity is that it doesn’t take therapy. You can remember it and imagine it. Then start moving everything else out of the way, because everything else is accumulated trash. Do not confuse this with the mistake of trying to relive your youth. That doesn’t work. The point of finding wreckage is to clear it, not dwell in it.

2. I am the problem. If you’re my problem, I don’t have a solution. Example: I am the common variable in my string of failed relationships. Knowing this, I don’t search for the perfect wife, who doesn’t exist, I try instead to become the best husband I can. Recognizing this instantaneously frees me to look around and make a few improvements.

3. Understanding Ignorance. Most of us do our best, i.e., we do as well as we know how in any moment. Most of my memorable mistakes weren’t maligned character but ignorance. When I see that in myself I see it in you too. It makes it easier to forgive us both. Learn stuff, avoid ignorant mistakes. When I know better I do better.

My go-to philosophical paradigm for contending with things I can’t change has been Stoicism, and for the intentional direction of how I experience life, a God-centered phenomenology.

The Limits of Philosophy

Stoicism. Stoicism is an effective behavior management system. Thoroughly embodied, even “soul” management. Sustained daily practice resulted for me in imperturbability, a simplified mindset, and discernment of my range of control. I was much freed from wasting time trying to control the uncontrollable. A measure of peace within an inner citadel.

Stoicism did not free me from myself, though it has enabled conscious self-control. But in moments when I was caught off guard—at the margins of my own behavior—I was as apt to react with self-preservation, anger or sarcastic disdain as ever. Though I can refine my reflective will through disciplined thought, my impulsive will is rooted in identity and conditioning, not thought. It’s automatic. Not even Marcus Aurelius could keep me from cussing my coffee table when I split my shin on it. My Stoic practice failed to reach the deepest part of my identity, replete with its hallowed ideas, entrenched beliefs, and the decades of conditioned thought they engendered. These beliefs are discussed in another essay, “Mind Over Matter.”

I think you’ll enjoy these next few academic paragraphs as much as I, like a mouthful of sawdust, so bear with me.

Phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of “phenomena.” Its focus is the structures of knowledge and experience. As a discipline, phenomenology is awareness of all the ways I view and move in the world.

Our experience includes observable, measurable, biological, environmental, neurological, dream states, premonitions, sensual and sensuous, mythological and spiritual, and everything we can feel or perceive.

“Structures” of experience range from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. Elemental to it is “intentionality”, or how I direct forms of experience toward the world. 1

So what? Impenetrable academic jargon is of little use. What I learned, slowly, is that what I observe in life is of far less importance than how I perceive it. How I intentionally direct or orient my mind determines how I perceive things.

What Worked for Me in Philosophy

1) The Reframe. As structures or mental models (~paradigms) determine how I interpret the world, understanding them and reframing my structures changes how I perceive everything— “there is not enough” or “everything’s a competition” or “I’m the center of the universe” becomes “there’s plenty to go around”, “we’re all in this together” and “we are made for each other.”

Things aren’t happening to me—they’re just happening.

2) Believe in the Unseen World. I can choose the nature of my experience by directing my mind with awe and reverence toward an unseen world that I cannot understand. This knocks out the walls of what is possible. I like to pay attention to “divine coincidence”, those moments when you get the same message from the universe three times in two days in totally unrelated ways. I once was deciding whether to accept a job offer. In a single day, I came across Nancy Reagan’s old anti-drug campaign, “Just Say No”, I walked into my living room to hear a sitcom character say, “No! No! No!”, and a buddy of mine said, “‘No’ is a complete sentence”, referencing a task he’d gotten outside his chain-of-command. I thought back on this after I turned down the job, which turned out to be a good decision, and thought, “maybe . . .”

3) Recognize what I can control and what I can’t. What I can control does not extend beyond my fingertips and often ends at my ribcage. What I can’t control I must accept or it will drive me insane. #1 on the Can’t Control list is other people. #1 on the Can Control list is what I say and don’t.

4) What I focus on becomes my reality. I’ve tried to create a habit of imagining the best things throughout the day. The best way for has been to memorize edifying things and chew on them constantly: scripture, poetry, complex ideas. Contemplate until they illuminate.

5) Eat it today, wear it tomorrow. I’ve learned to filter what I watch, read, listen to, eat, speak, or think—avoiding anything I don’t want to become. Everything I consume is the building material for or is absorbed into the structures through which I interpret my experience. How I interpret the world = my reality.

6) Do Stuff. True knowledge is derived from experience alone. Academic knowledge is like memorizing a menu and experiential knowledge is eating the food.

Experiences teaches us that we are more than we can imagine and that there are powers beyond us.

Change the easy stuff, decide if the hard stuff is worth it, and cope with the rest.

My long spiritual journey is characterized by repeated failure to conform or transform, theological fatigue, doubt, and rejection of the formulaic lifelessness of western Christianity. I haven’t attended a church in years. I don’t want to join another team or eat ineffective placebo in a controlled cultural study. The God-shaped hole remains.

I just read Brennan Manning’s Abba’s Child, 2015 edition. The book was a gift. I discovered that it was a gift in more ways than one.

Manning’s book is replete with thoughts and quotes worthy of consideration. Stories with morals. Woven into it is a simple message of life and love.

I’ve captured many of his thoughts below for myself and am sharing them with you.

1. The False Self vs. True Identity

These quotes explore the “false self” as a deceptive, lazy facade that resists growth, and the call to embrace authentic identity rooted in God.

• What I think I believe about God may simply be what I believe about myself.

• Codependency is a loss of identity.

• Esse quam videri—Be rather than seem to be.

• “The false self specializes in treacherous disguise. He is the lazy part of self, resisting the effort, asceticism, and discipline that intimacy with God requires . . . The false self’s lame excuses allow us to maintain the status quo.” (Pg. 24)

• “Prayer is death to every identity that does not come from God.” (Pg. 25)

• “The false self is skilled at the controlled openness that scrupulously avoids any significant self-disclosure.” (Pg. 38)

• “Thomas Merton began to see that the highest spiritual development was to be ‘ordinary,’ to become fully a man, in the way few human beings succeed in becoming so simply and naturally themselves . . . the measures of what others might be if society did not distort them with greed or ambition or lust or desperate want.” (Pg. 32)

• Both self-importance and self-worthlessness are self-absorption and self-deification. (Pg. 138)

2. Self-Hatred, Projection, and Inner Destruction

A recurring theme of how we weaponize low self-worth against ourselves, often mistaking it for external spiritual attacks.

• I project my feelings about myself into a concept of God.

• I wage war on myself with a psychological weapon—namely feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth—and think I’m “under attack” from the Devil himself.

• “Whatever is denied cannot be healed.” (Pg. 25)

• “Self-hatred always results in some form of self-destruction.” (Pg. 26)

• People have only the power over me that I give them. I enslave myself to people when I care what they think of me. Needing the approval of others is me willingly submitting to a stranglehold.

• Only when I am reconciled to the love of Jesus Christ—where I am and as I am—can I love my enemy, most notably myself, the greatest of all my enemies. (Pg. 139)

3. The Qualities of Love

Emphasizing humanity’s deep need for God, the triumph of openness, and accepting divine love as the foundation for self-acceptance.

• “We are made for God, and nothing less will really satisfy us.” (Pg. 24)

• “No one can speak for me . . . either I escape into skepticism and intellectualism, or with radical amazement I surrender in faith to the truth of my belovedness.” (Pg. 41)

• The first quality of love is its indiscriminate character.

• “To open yourself to another person, to stop lying about your loneliness and your fears, to be honest about your affections, and to tell others how much they mean to you—this openness is the triumph of the child over the pharisee . . .” (Pg. 70)

• “The un-self-consciousness of the child keeps us from morbid introspection, endless self-analysis, and the fatal narcissism of spiritual perfectionism . . .” (Pg. 76)

4. The Pitfalls of Religion and the Freedom of True Identity

Critiques of rigid religion, superficial success, and the need for vulnerability, discipline, and truth over appearances.

• The Bible is a love story. Religion chokes out the life, joy, and mystery of it.

• Religion makes us as intolerant of others as we are of ourselves.

• Thomas Merton: “If I had a message to my contemporaries . . . it was surely this: be anything you like, madmen, drunks . . . but at all costs avoid one thing: success.” (Pg. 66)

• “The only reason for doing the right thing is that it is the right thing to do; all other reasons are reasons for doing something else.” (F.M. Cornford, Pg. 94)

• “Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.” (M. Scott Peck, Pg. 95)

• “An increasing passion for truth evokes a growing indifference to public opinion and to what people say or think.” (Pg. 119)

• Humility is stark raving honesty. (Pg. 136)

• “The lives of those engaged in the human struggle will be riddled with bullet holes . . . wounds are necessary . . . those who wear bulletproof vests . . . will never know what love is.” (Pg. 140)

5. Fear, Cynicism, and Commitment

Reflections on how fear, cynicism, and avoidance lead to emptiness, while commitment and passion lead to fullness.

• “I am most afraid of death when I am most afraid of life.” (Pg. 128)

• “. . . the cynic is a hurt sentimentalist turned inside out.” (Pg. 133)

• “Paradoxically, we attain self-awareness, not by self-analysis, but by the leap of commitment.” (Pg. 134)

• “The sheer vacuity of the unlived life guarantees the person will never be missed.” You have to taste life deeply enough to become a saint or sinner. (Pg. 135)

• We are a society “marinating in its own incestuous self-interest.” (Pg. 127)

The Seduction Hotel bar, maybe 2015. A bright, loud place where I know no one yet everyone swears they’ve seen me before. San Antonio, New Orleans, snapshots of some city that I think was Cincinnati but how in hell would I have ended up in Cincinnati? A Thursday that tastes like every Thursday since 2013 or 2008 or whenever I lost count.

The woman next to me spins her wedding ring like she’s trying to screw off her finger and laughs like an alarm low on batteries. I can taste her moral crisis. She buys me a double vodka, chilled, neat, because I look to her “like someone who has seen some shit.” She’s not wrong. Hell, just last night...

I drink the shot like I’m trying to erase the next sentence of my life. Two more of those and a handful of mixed nuts. I pump the brakes with a beer and halfway through it, order another shot. The pendulum swings from “stop now” to “never stop” and back like Conor McGregor sharing a mic with a grizzly bear. Soon neither voice will matter. Shots until I don’t care who’s writing the story as long as I get to be the hero. I tell her every lie I can think of. Then her room. Then the ceiling fan doing what they do when you’re drunk three days, which is become the only clock in the universe, ticking off the exact seconds until you hate yourself again.

4 A.M. Street Theology Another street at 4 a.m. lost in shadows, dodging cones of yellow street lamp light. Another morning with its assembled regret. Like Nasruddin says, if I knew why I was stumbling around at 4 a.m., I’d have been home hours ago.

30,000 Feet of Fiction The morning is when I can’t remember if I did anything responsible or just hoped really hard. I travel. I’m wearing a suit jacket and a Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt, neither of which I had packed. The TSA guy looks at my ID and then at me and then at my ID again, like maybe the photo was taken before I became whatever this is. From 30,000 feet the world looks like a place I’d like to be from. I rehearse the stories I’ve told anywhere I did not have to be myself. I prefer myself a fiction, gliding in the dizzying littoral space that is neither solid earth nor liquid sea, neither fully awake nor dreaming.

The lady across the aisle asks if I’m OK. I shrug and smirk. I smell like a distillery fire. She changes seats. I order three minis and ice in a clean glass and drink them like it’s my last communion.

The jolt of the airplane’s landing gear striking the tarmac is a hard reality. I awake in my city, my “home”, though I do not feel as though I have one. I could be anywhere but I am here. I have to be here. Two shots in the terminal on the way to baggage claim. I drive directly to a bar on state street. The band is four kids who look like they were assembled from my yearbook photos if my entire graduating class was on bath salts. I drink until the room tilts, until the music sounds like a dial tone from God.

The Aftermath Morning. The shuffling, the deep sadness. Everything is exactly how I left it. A museum of artifacts. I am left with nothing but myself. I am he who was once mutilated and failed to recover in any sense that my deep self considers adequate.

I drink a glass of water and then puke something the color of antifreeze that ranks like every promise I’ve broken. I remember I have a bottle of vodka in the freezer. When I pull it out I feel my heart jack-hammering. It’s a third full. I take a long pull. Another last communion. Another promise. I almost pour the rest down the sink. I log the almost as a moral victory. An hour later I finish the bottle.

Day three without a drink and my body turns itself inside out trying to wring the poison out of my flesh. It doesn’t know that I am the poison. My skin is three sizes too small. I raged and now I writhe. I smell like cat piss and dirty pennies. My nervous system stages a coup. I fill a glass with water but my hand shakes so badly I spill it on the floor before I can get it to my mouth. I pace until I collapse. Then nightmares and the sweating torture me until I wake an hour later to sun beating through my window trying to murder me, shivering in my wet sheets. Pace. Sweat. Shiver. Die. Repeat.

The Violent Purification Ritual A pressure builds below my throat, high in my chest, a rising tide of fuck-all welling like a surge. At times, I fight it. Other times, I let it break and cough and sob out a decade of wreckage. I might crack a rib. It is violent, purifying, mysterious. The pain I’ve caused the people in my life I unknowingly carried, a barbed wire ball of hot chemical weight . Now my body would rid me of it.

The Slow Fade Back to the Bottle I’ve been here before, when my prayers are hostage negotiations with a God I’m not sure I believe in. I sober up and the misery quickly fades. The lists I make of the costs of drinking, the things and time and people I’ve squandered, and the dark days of shaking and sweating it out, I choose to forget.

I take a long hot bath in sentimental self-pity that sounds like I’ve been disconnected from this Earth and its inhabitants forever. I am alone on this planet. My great regret is the missing of what I am supposed to see. I am a fraud, a failed saint. It’s all prose getting drunk on its own words.

Life invited; I wrote back “regrets.”

Ten nights later, I finally sleep. Like dropping a wet cloak from my back and removing a mask from my hot face I open my eyes like a blind man healed.

I have a composite memory of things that are supposed to matter to me. I want to pack those memories into a recognizable silhouette, but cannot. It is a bent reflection in a polished brass doorknob, the one I’ve always turned on my way out.

I’ve lost the acute poignancy of fresh pain. Now, to the dull gnawing business of it.

Reconciliation This week was bright and clear and cool and heavy. How so clear a day can feel dense and bleak, I don’t know. I drive slowly and see a swing sway gently in the neighborhood park. The swing is not, as I usually experience it, an invitation to remember something sweet. It appears a dead thing where once was a laughing child. Its song is a dirge.

I picture a mourning family in a dark house and feel the hushed weight. I remember running from shadows in terror and have believed this made me special. I’m not.

I realize how little attention I pay to other people, how I don’t study their faces to learn, don’t look as deeply into their eyes as I could, were I intent on hearing the story they really want to tell. I realize other people aren’t just characters in my story.

A lie is that beauty can only be created from pain. But if I pay attention, I might notice something I’ve missed, or slow a world that spins at dizzying speeds long enough to observe a thing at length. Then I can know it for what it is—nothing else—and only then can I love it. Beauty from beauty.

True love is when you don’t remind me of anybody else but you.

My days are now impossibly plain. I prefer myself a non-fiction. Each day I perform heroic acts, like lifting weights, drinking coffee without spilling it down my shirt, and showing up to work. Now and again, on the way home, I catch the snickering of neon lights in my periphery and on some nights hear the old music play.

These days I just don’t dance to it.

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My Descent into The Hinge: A Raw Awakening

Fifteen years ago, I jolted awake at 2 a.m. in a suffocatingly silent house, my heart pounding like a war drum, trapped in a life that had turned into a cruel mockery of itself. The military career I had bled for almost fifteen grueling years revealed itself as nothing more than a painted facade crumbling under the weight of my denial. My marriage, which I had dismissed to “chase my dreams” exposed itself as a hollow shell—two weary strangers bound by bills and faded memories, drifting in quiet desperation. My body screamed in protest, every ache an accusation; my once-sharp wit had dulled to bitter sarcasm, and the clever maneuvers that used to unlock every opportunity now slammed doors in my face. I had stumbled blindly to the end of a life stage, ignoring every warning sign, and now the void stared back, mocking me. The map I clung to was torn and outdated, leaving me unhinged—dangling precariously on the threshold between a dying past and an unknown terror. I flailed in ego-fueled ignorance until, a few years later, the entire structure collapsed.

I drifted alone through what little remained for a couple years and then across the country to a rented house and a storage unit full of souvenirs I didn’t know what to do with. Finally, on the heels of a five-day bender, I faced the shattered fragments of myself, the locked-away expressions I had buried, and realized the agony of adaptation was the only path to reclaiming wholeness. It was a soul-rending examination that forced me to sharpen new knives or drink myself to death in the ruins.

Humiliation does not necessitate humility, but it offers the choice.

Morning and Afternoon of the Soul

“The basic facts of the psyche undergo a very marked alteration in the course of life… we could almost speak of a psychology of life’s morning and a psychology of its afternoon.” — Carl Jung, 1929

Youth expands outward; age contracts inward. The young man’s neurosis is hesitation. The older man’s neurosis is clinging to a season that has passed.

The Three-Legged Riddle

The Sphinx asked: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” Answer: Man.

Every human life moves through three mythic phases. Most men treat one phase as the whole journey. When the old strategies stop working, they panic, double down, or numb out. They never learned the play has acts.

Caught unawares, a man is confused when his methods are no longer effective and when his existence begins to feel meaningless. The game is rigged. Once stable structures become deteriorating, unoccupied houses on a cul-de-sac. I hold up my end of the bargain only to discover the promises were empty. I have reached the end of a life stage, commonly referred to as a mid-life crisis.

Characterizing the necessary periods and understanding the nature of the passage periods between them is the key to answering the basic philosophical questions of becoming a “good person” and living the “good life.” Wherever I currently reside on the path between cradle and grave, and whatever I am, the choice to languish or live is mine.

Hinge Periods: The Most Dangerous—and Fertile—Time

I call the transitions “hinge periods.” You feel crazy, lost, or both. That’s the point. The old edifice must crumble so something truer can be built.

Hinge periods are an invitation to integrate toward wholeness, a word that shares a root with holiness. If not understood, they can also result in functional disintegration. I’m a slow learner. I had to disintegrate before I could reintegrate.

The nature of a road is to fork. When I am shown again an old map, one forgotten, I find my place on it far from any final destination. Where I find I have “arrived” is no destination at all. Traveling the old road is pointless. Remaining at the juncture is a slow death. Ahead lies a road I have never traveled.

At the hinge you have three choices:

1. Look backward and replay a dead script.

2. Languish in purgatory, staring at what was.

3. Live forward. Take stock, sharpen what still cuts, and step onto the road you’ve never traveled.

Kierkegaard was right: life is understood backward but lived forward.

The Missing Fourth Leg: Realign Your Center of Gravity

Robert A. Johnson speaks of adding a “fourth dimension” to three-dimensional life—like inserting the Devil into the Trinity. In military terms he calls it shifting your Center of Gravity (CoG), the hub from which all power and movement flow.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), a Prussian general and author of a (arguably the) seminal text on warfare, defined the CoG as “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.

Self-help, Stoicism, and habit-stacking can make you more effective inside the old stage, but they cannot give that effectiveness meaning.

For meaning, your CoG must move from yourself and into a Higher Purpose. Paradoxically, only surrender of the small will to a larger Will delivers true personal responsibility and an abundant life. In short, you have to find God. In Jungian terms, this is infusing a 3-dimensional aesthetic life with a fourth dimension of spiritual power.

• Appropriate action, what matters and what doesn’t, is understood contextually.

• Meaning is derived relationally.

• My responsibilities and what they mean are understood through that which I serve.

• Personal responsibility is effective and meaningful only within the context of a set of moral and ethical absolutes.

• Relativism is worthless in this endeavor.

You can become the most disciplined, optimized man in the graveyard of a dead stage and still miss the entire point.

In short: without “getting religion”—in the deepest and most relational sense—all the effort is just selecting between treadmills or switching seats on the Titanic.

If you find yourself in Purgatory, the hinge is swinging. Look, languish, or live. There is no fourth option.

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INTRODUCTION: THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND STRONGFIRST 5/3/1

This program fuses two proven strength training philosophies from two of the most respected coaches in the iron game: Pavel Tsatsouline (StrongFirst) and Jim Wendler (5/3/1). Each brings unique principles that, when combined, create a system that’s simple, sustainable, and brutally effective. Less is more.

PAVEL TSATSOULINE’S STRONGFIRST PRINCIPLES

“Strength is a Skill” – Pavel revolutionized strength training by treating it like learning to play piano. You build strength through frequent, flawless practice of perfect movement patterns.

JIM WENDLER’S 5/3/1 PRINCIPLES

“Simple Works Forever” – 5/3/1 distills decades of programming into four lifts and three simple rules.

This is the programming I use as a template for all of my strength training, combining it with Pavel’s principles. You can get as creative as you like and continually experiment, as long as you adhere to the proven methods and principles that these two coaches have tested and perfected.

These are the 20% of lifts and practices that yield 80% of the desired results. Everything else is just details or distractions. I keep it as simple as possible, training a few things a few times a week with plenty of recovery. I mix it up every 8-12 weeks to keep things fresh.

MY TOTAL PROGRAM OF STRENGTH AND NUTRITION IN TWO SENTENCES

1. Push, Pull, Hinge, & Twist 3-4X per week with—in Pavel’s words—”a weight heavy enough to respect but light enough to not fear.”

2. Manage body composition and overall health through nutrition.

*And remember to relax. If you’re reading this you’re not training for the Olympics. Neither am I.

THREE OPTIONS

1. Click the Pavel and Wendler links above. Read up. Do what they tell you.

2. If you want to start immediately, pick a template I’ve built and get to work.

3. Recommended action: do both.

The downloadable PDF is below.

How To Get Strong A Practical Guide With Training Templates For All Levels

208KB ∙ PDF file

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I thought I could fix everything in my life by attacking it. It took me too long to learn that I can’t nut-kick and headbutt my life into submission. I had to hit the brakes. Stop doing more things. Do fewer things better. The 80% Solution is a principle-driven improvement system I’ve implemented and refined over 25 years as a military officer, physical fitness coach, entrepreneur, and autodidact. Increasingly, it runs toward its simplest version. It is comprised of core components:

1. The Pareto Principle. Identifies and governs the 20% of things in your life that yield the most positive results and the 20% that create the most negative outcomes.

2. Via Negativa. Recognizes that what we don’t do is at least as important as what we do. Subtraction is often better than addition.

Below, I’ll show you how these components work together in practice — first by explaining each one with real-world examples, then by giving you a dead-simple 4-step framework you can start using today.

Simple doesn’t mean easy. But hard doesn’t have to be stupid hard. There’s a fine line between being a hard ass and a dumb ass.

The 80% Solution can be applied across domains, from personal well-being to professional productivity. Its beauty is found in its simplicity and the low stress way in which it can be implemented. By taking the long view on results and the immediate view on next steps, you are freed from feeling overwhelmed, from self-doubt, and from quitting before you start.

The Pareto Principle

Pareto’s Principle (a.k.a. the 80/20 Rule), named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, asserts that 80% of outputs result from 20% of inputs. Pareto’s findings indicated the potential for a natural law. It applies advantageously and adversely with consistency.

• 20% of my daily work activities yield 80% of my results

• 20% of what I eat results in 80% of my weight gain

• The top 20% of employees make a company money and the bottom 20% cost a company money

Why Does This Matter? The principle matters. It matters because anything above what’s effective, unless it’s for pure enjoyment, is a waste of time and energy, the first an unrenewable commodity and the second a finite resource. Applied systematically to my life, I discovered that years of accrual create a life defined by excess.

• Identifying and eliminating waste is critical. We eat too much. We drink too much. Most of our clothes never leave the closet. Our garage, our kitchen, our inboxes, our supplement cabinets — 80% of it is dead weight dragging us backward.

• Pareto in action. The U.S. Marines, the smallest of the DoD components, historically receives about 10% of the DoD budget. Marines train to do one thing and marshall every resource toward it. Everything else is a distraction that they ignore. A Marine toast, given in the reconnaissance community, includes the line, “We have done so much, for so long, with so little, that we are now capable of doing anything with nothing.”

Next, why subtraction beats addition.

Via Negativa

There is often as much power in not doing as in doing. Via Negativa is not only apophatic theology, which seeks to understand God and reality by defining what is not, but is also a philosophy of recognizing the power of negation, non-action, and elimination as counterbalance to action and addition.

• Inaction is an appropriate action. In response to wildland forest fires, ecologists have learned that letting it burn is the best overall course of action. Except for the protection of human life and property, the best thing to do with a wildfire is nothing.

• 80% of problems are solved by not doing something. If half of my diet consists of sugar and simple starches, I cannot add enough vitamins and exercise to ameliorate the negative effects of my diet. If I were to stop eating sugar, simply subtract a single thing from the equation, 80% of the problem is solved by what I don’t do and without adding anything.

• Avoiding ignorance wields power equal to that of cultivating wisdom. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote, “Since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.” (Antifragile, Pg. 303)

The Power of Elimination. Via Negativa applies broadly and is simple to implement. An old parable illustrates how it is applied in problem-solving (and therapy) by using the simplest means possible: I can’t smooth the road I travel, but I can put on boots. Do the simplest thing that solves the problem.

• Most victories are just not losing. Eliminating unhealthy or excessive elements from your life is the shortest route to health. Externally, all around us are the piled, stored, flabby, and dusty reminders of our excess. The elimination of needless objects from our lives is a great place to start. With a little practice, we can move to more difficult items and intangibles.

• Enough is Enough. By focusing on what is meaningful or necessary, and saying no to most else, I begin to have a clearer definition of “enough.” When I define enough, I realize that I have everything I need. I don’t need more.

• Subtraction beats addition. You must stop the bleeding before you can treat the wounds. The difference between a crisis and an inconvenience is defined by the threat of devastation. In medical triage, a crisis is a threat to life, limb, or eyesight. In business, medicine, relationships, fitness, health, and life the attributes of soundness rely on knowing priorities.

Enough theory. Here’s the exact system I use every single day — and the one you can copy starting tomorrow.

Practical Application

1. Mindset.

• Strength Math. Cultivate the patience of a strength athlete. Think patience, consistency, and relaxed resolution. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Think in year math, not month math. If I were to add three pounds per week to any exercise, I’d add 156 pounds to that lift in a year. The same principle applies to losing weight, learning a language, or writing a book.

• Consistency. Anything worth doing is worth doing every day. Ten minutes every day is better than two hours every Saturday.

2. Triage. Identify where the bleeding is the worst. Is it financial, nutritional, chemical, a dysfunctional relationship? Square up and address it. Stop the bleeding. Fixing this one thing will improve your life immediately.

3. Prioritize. Take stock of the big buckets. Identify the one thing from which you derive the most joy or most success. Do more of that. Next, identify the one thing that you hate the most. Eliminate it or make a plan to fix it.

4. Life is Rhythm. Break down your typical day into 30-minute or 60-minute time blocks. Find your discretionary time. What is it filled with now? How much of it do you waste scrolling, drinking, or bingeing Netflix? How late do you sleep? Clear your discretionary calendar of all nonsense. Reclaim your mornings. Begin a new rhythm by allocating time blocks every day to something that matters. Establish a daily rhythm of at least one hour well-spent.

Results. Once you begin to see results, you will naturally want more. Discipline will become self-sustaining, a skill of its own and a muscle getting stronger. Your life will assume a predictable rhythm: you tighten things up, adjust time blocks, and keep adding three pounds a week to what you’re doing. You won’t believe what a year will bring.

“If you seek tranquility, do less… Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’” — Marcus Aurelius

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Since 2001, more than 140,000 veterans have killed themselves. Figures vary, but veteran suicide has killed more veterans than combat deaths in every war since Vietnam combined.

Where is the televised body count for this war?

Between 6,000 and 6,700 veterans die by suicide every year; that’s 16-18 deaths per day on average—about one veteran every 90 minutes. Each one decides that death is a better option than the life they’re living. It is the second leading cause of death for veterans under the age of 45. The risk of suicide for veterans is 58% higher than for those who have not served. The barista at Starbucks has a better chance of surviving life in America than a man or woman professionally trained by the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known.

This has been happening for 24 years straight.

Every recruit signs up hoping for something. He’s swept up in the fervor after 9/11; she wants to make her dad proud; she wants to get the hell out of the small-town trailer she grew up in; he’s going nowhere and wants to go somewhere. This crisis stems not just from war’s traumas but from a lack of meaning and connection at home, as explored below.

I don’t blame the Department of War, as it’s now aptly called. Our martial institutions exist to kill American adversaries, not to prevent us from killing ourselves. Saving American servicemen is not its mission. But families are gutted. Politicians are compelled. The government refuses to accept responsibility. Nobody knows what to do. Our War Department is left holding the bag.

Military generals do what they know to do. Design a strategy, write a war plan. Implement a program. Delegate to the lowest level. Make everybody sign a roster. Hold junior leaders accountable. Create plausible deniability for Congressional hearings. What else could we expect? It already has a mission it can barely meet. Military leaders have their hands full simply trying to get recruits to sign up and to train soldiers. So, soldiers, airmen, and Marines are required to sit in stuffy auditoriums to receive “resiliency training”, or a rebranded Ready and Resilient (R2) strategy, a recycled combination of videos and PowerPoint slides created by the lowest bidder.

Every year, the training is similar. Every year, veterans kill themselves by the thousands.

We shed far more American blood on American soil than we shed across the globe. The military is the action arm of politics. Our political leaders start wars they won’t let us win. The strategic narrative is threadbare. It feels at first like slight of hand, then a bait-and-switch, and then a lie. Beyond programs, the real weight lies in the things we carry—both physical and emotional.

The Things We Carry

I’ve heard purpose defined as the lifting of a worthwhile burden. Our men and women in uniform lift and carry heavy things. In Tim O’Brien’s seminal reflection on the Vietnam war, The Things They Carried, he considers and connects the physical and emotional weight of burdens carried by soldiers. Structurally, the stories pivot between past and present. Absent are the soldiers’ visions of a future. When the burdens carried are stripped of worth, sacrifice is stripped of meaning. A meaningless existence is one without a future. The result is that we sacrifice our sons and daughters on an altar raised to a god we no longer believe in. When one of those sons or daughters survives the fight in a foreign land but loses the fight after they return home, their blood does not go silently into the dirt. Sadly, the screams of blood are lost in the deafening side-show cacophony of our culture.

One psychological theory suggests that post-traumatic stress is most often caused not by what a soldier witnesses, but by what he himself does. We fly across the ocean confident in our righteousness, imagining the enemy as inhuman, evil, and cancerous. Eradicating them is the Lord’s work. What we often discover in combat is that our enemy is human, with families of their own, and that our capacity for violence and ruthlessness exceeds theirs. Who then is the “bad guy?” It can be temporarily disorienting, at best, and cause existential disintegration, at worst. Soldiers imprison themselves.

Prisoners of War Walk Among Us

These prisoners made it home but are still over there mentally, facing a daily existential knot they can’t untie. They are prisoners of their minds. They suffer from a dis-integration of self inextricably lashed to a dis-integrated national myth. Who is “good” and who “bad” become unanswerable questions. If they’re mentally there and physically here, they aren’t anywhere. If they’re not the “good guy” anymore but can’t bear to be the “bad guy” of their combat experience, they aren’t anyone they can identify. They are unrecognizable to themselves. America is no longer the country they grew up in. The only thing a system can organize around is identity. Fractured identities create fractured systems and fractured lives. Modern psychology teaches that an “either/or” mindset prevents the healing that a “both/and” integration brings. Compartmentalization is not a long-term solution. We cannot salvage a dying myth, but we can help bring them home.

It is often said that soldiers fight for the men and women beside them in the fighting hole, not for country, liberty, or even their families at home. We fight for the brothers who fight with us. We fight for love, for “there is no greater love.”

Our government, The Department of War, and The Department of Veteran’s Affairs cannot save us. Programs can educate and doctors can medicate, at times useful things, but integration is achieved only through connection, both at the individual human level and in community. We are each other’s keepers. We each are the neighbor, the man on the street, the one who notices the other in the crowded restaurant. We each are the sister and the brother. Institutions are doomed to fail as substitutes for individual and communal responsibility.

Today, if on no other day, pause an extra moment if you cross paths with a veteran. Saying, “Thanks for your service” is a significant improvement over the contemptuous disdain our Vietnam veterans met from fellow citizens. Let them know that you’re glad they made it home and that our country still needs them, now more than ever. If you pause a little longer, grip their hand an extra heartbeat, and look them in the eye, you may be the first one who invites them home.

Homecoming

In the early days of the war in Iraq, I buried a genuine war hero whose leadership saved the lives of countless Marines. His name was Jim. Assigned as the Casualty Assistance Officer (CAO), I was the man who knocked on the door of Jim’s home to deliver the devastation to his wife and children, guided her through the bureaucracy of claiming death benefits, and organized the funeral.

Duty as a CAO is one that no officer wants. It is one of the heaviest and most profound of the burdens we carry. We put the world on pause and lose ourselves in the grief, the emptiness of loss, and the surging of love into our ordinary lives.

Several hundred people attended the funeral, including an entire police department, fire-fighters, veterans of foreign wars, and several churches. One of the biggest Marines in our battalion stood at attention through the funeral, like a monolith, as part of the honor detail. A reporter published his picture in the newspaper, standing tall and fierce in his dress blue uniform, with tears streaming down his resolute face. Jim’s wife was Japanese. I memorized a Japanese warrior blessing, taught to me by a local restaurant owner, and did my best to speak it correctly as I handed to her our folded flag. I fought to keep my bearing as I slowly saluted her, though grief built inside me like a tide. To shed a tear before her would dishonor Jim.

After the hushed departure and the slow dispersion of the crowd, I sat in the silence of my truck, undone. On the cardboard back of a notepad, I scribbled a eulogy, a letter to Jim, a love letter.

Homecoming

The men  
Uniformed in their blue  
Appear black at the edges  
As they and their white gloves  
Descend the stair and bear 

 
The burden of brotherhood  
Between two trim ranks  
And upon each shoulder  
An equal weight  

Unlike any weight  
Draped in starched Glory  
Honored in the neatly stepped sorrow  
Of a descending stair  
A precise duty  
Like a combat blow 

To the base of a skull  
With practiced efficiency  
Or like standing stiffly at arms  
Freshly shaven  
Bleached cuff and collar  
Squared step 

 
Rounding itself into a procession  
That has nothing to do with procession  
Or the heavy blanket of ceremony  
Or the hollow echoes of remembrance  
Or the uncertain light that casts  
A shadow below each stair  

Unlike the unshadowed boys  
Clean and strong and certain  
Speechless when tears fall from stone  
Fixed on the thirteen screws through the wood  
Riveting him inside  
Insisting forever that they cannot  
Kiss the brother in their midst.

In remembering Jim and countless others, we confront the body count that demands our attention.

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• Depth beats scope. Don’t do more things, do fewer things better.

• Consistency is the prime variable.

• Knowledge changes nothing material until it resides in your hands and feet.

• Mastery runs toward simplicity.

• Discipline is a skill; you can learn it.

• The most powerful word in our times is “no.”

I will continue to explore these and want to share what I find with a cohort of fellow thinkers, doers, and creators, those who materialize vision through action. I need people who can help keep me sharp, who will remind me to not accept the status quo, who refuse to conform,

and those who slam the door on the noise of our age. We will walk through this world, but not be of it.

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