Today I was having a bit of a scatter-brain-day;
It was raining which sabotaged my plans to go for a walk.
And by the time it was dry my day had been so unsatisfactory that I didn’t give a fuck about walking anymore. I just wanted to get shit done. Because I had spent the unwelcome extra hours indoor pondering questions like:
“Hmmm? Should I perhaps take that coaching training? Learn that skill? Work that job?”
Only to then conclude: OF COURSE THE FUCK NOT.
And got completely lost in trying to make money, saving myself, and sticking to my newborn dream. Which at times, I completely forgot about.
I felt like a parent forgetting they just had a child.
Shameful.
Your PURPOSE comes by and that’s how easily you’re offtrack?
Really?
And a nasty voice in my head even wanted to convince me, I might as well take the easier road then, to a life where the bills are paid.
“Since apparently, your dream is not that important to you anyway.”
But of course it is very important to me. It’s just that if three days ago you still thought of yourself as a yoga teacher, and now you know that your future is to become a sprinter/ athlete; you need time to adjust.
I have caught myself making a gagging sound, if Facebook suggests a yoga post to me, that’s how much I ve completely had it with all of yoga. Which doesn’t mean I don’t see myself doing yoga anymore. I just might! Once I ve completely distanced myself from it, anything can happen.
But right now, I m in the: “I can’t believe we let this drag on for so long”-phase.
And it’s just a little hard for me to stay the course, the vision is still so new! It’s not ingrained yet.
But it’s there.
Of course it’s there!
So when I had wasted the good part of my day grasping at straws and not getting any closer to feeling better, I decided I needed to reconnect with my dream. No matter how vague it was. No matter how discouraging, that I had not heard yet from the number one organisation that I was relying on for help.
But this was not their dream.
I wanted to become a sprinter, an athlete over forty. And I was going to monetize that as soon as possible: It was my dream.
And I was going to build it alone, and with my bare hands if I had to.
So I Googled on the psychology of sprinting.
First I encountered a lot of articles on psychology when training sprinters. Which wasn’t what I was looking for, but it did gave me an article that unexpectedly moved me to tears.
It turned out that ever since the eighties, running was explained with the spring model: The idea that like a pogo stick the body compresses like a spring, and then releases, producing an upward and forward running motion.
They kind of vaguely knew that the sprinters had “more of a spring” in their step, but no one knew why.
Until in 2014 science showed that elite sprinters were not working on the pogo stick mechanism.
Elite sprinter aggressively kicked the ground!
The technique was the same among all of the elite sprinters, and not present among any of the other sports men and women who participated in the study.
Like I said it brought tears to my eyes. I was like: “I fucking knew it.”
It resonated with me, because I knew I had denied my own ability to aggressively kick the ground. I had started to believe that what I instinctively did (immediately push back in the blink of an eye!) was wrong, immature, dangerous even. As adults we were supposed to endure. Both in the sense of negativity/ bad things happening to us, as well as that we endured on our quest to get what it was that we wanted.
We didn’t just hit it in the head!
It was as if that sole sentence, that the sprinters kicked the ground, brought up all the strength-and-aggression shaming I had experienced all my life. Or at least had experienced until I had pushed it so far down that I forgot it existed. And becoming a yoga teacher became as good a job as any, since I wasn’t allowed to show my strength anyway.
I was way too fucking dangerous.
I was out of control.
Not civilized.
Might as well go to sleep then.
And I did.
My profile photo on my personal page on Facebook is one where I am asleep, and I have participated with that photo in a bunch of professional groups. Vaguely aware that this would be a good time to switch it for something more professional. And I also wondered why I was so attached to keeping it up.
And I realized the sleeping beauty picture was because that was how I saw my life:
“This is how much I engage in life. It’s safest for everybody. You don’t want to wake me up.”
I was not keeping myself small; I was fully absent. I was literally refusing to participate in life, refusing to show my true self.
Maybe the gagging sounds to the Facebook ads were simply me waking up. And was me not so much loathing yoga, but my own flaky attitude. That I had actually let them win, and coiled back up into hiding between the yoga mats for twenty fucking years, where I wouldn’t hurt anyone.
Not even the ground underneath my feet.
It reminds me of how I ve viewed working for a boss. I have always assumed everybody hated that. That it was simply a necessary evil if you wanted certain perks and benefits. But that you were handing in your declaration of independence in exchange for your contract.
I assumed everybody saw it like that.
Just like I assumed everybody’s first instinct was to push back!
But that they had chosen for the perks associated with being civilized.
Later I did found the article I was looking for. On the psychology of sprinters versus marathon runners. It was a selection method they applied in World War 2, in the UK air force. The ones with a sprinter attitude operated the planes that were to take off within minutes, and only had enough fuel and bombs for sixty minutes of battle.
The ones with the mental makeup of marathon runners were stationed on planes as a team, and their time in battle could last up to eight hours.
The article ended with the I expect supposedly soothing conclusion, that it required both psychological traits, to be a balanced personality. That to be either/or was a sign of Schizophrenia.
But I wasn’t listening. The previous article had already showed me where I needed to my life to go.
Move as fast as you can.
Go alone.
And don’t forget to kick the ground.
Like the fast track?
My life changes as lightning speed.
The Follow button is somewhere on this page.
Have you found it?
Of if you really don’t want to wait for this happy end, you can buy my erotica and diaries at my new improved shop (English books, might have to scroll down)
<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living
These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009 €15
LS Diary 2012-2013 € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014 €15
Mirage 2014 €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.
De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50
Het Boek Benjamin € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.
Mango €15
coming of age novelle
22 erotische verhalen € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin
Witte Tijgerin €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie
LS Harteveld 