Drowning, Treading, and Pushing – Wit's End with Josh
Language provides a deep comparative sense of things we experience. Commonly I hear things like, ” I can’t keep my head above water…. It feels like I’m drowning… I’ve been thrown in the deep end… the best I can do is just tread water…”
Like Nassim Taleb’s triad: Fragility, Robustness, and Antifragility, this triad would be something like: drowning, treading, and pushing. But what does that mean when it comes to architecting and living our lives? Because it seems like, for many (or most), it’s constant battle just to stave off drowning, let alone also getting somewhere.
Treading water is hard enough…
Liken it to the jiu jitsu approach laid out by Ryron Gracie: Defend, Escape, Control, Submit. You’re always doing one of those 4 — and each being a pre-requisite for the next. You can only escape once you’ve sufficiently defended. You can only control after you’ve escaped your opponents control. You can only submit once you have sufficient control. So, first defend, then escape, then control, then submit. Which is simple enough… but not easy.
Any hard activity has this quality: it provide a lens to find the deep similarities with other aspects of life. Runners talk about “life being a marathon, not a sprint,” and getting accustomed to long-sustained, uncomfortable effort. Actors talk about life “being a stage” and needing to perform when the lights are brightest, and so on…
These things equip us with a skillset to keep us sane and moving forward when we’re told, “You’re on your own now. Figure it out,”
We’re all the “Man in the Arena” to some extent. And it’s ultimately between us and what works…
What can we influence — and what can we take ownership of?
Modern noise has interfered with the very human process of filling idle, silent time with this broad, scaled back existential thinking. It stirs up angst and turmoil, and it’s easier to distract with our phones and outsource thinking and desires to others. I think the distracting and outsourcing is having a terrible effect on our health and development.
Framed existentially, there’s a need for a deep strategy. Playing the mental game well.
Nothing sharpens the edge of somebody’s spirit like competition. In the Coddling Generation, competition has certainly softened.
And there is is a real cost.
Meanwhile, thankfully, we still have bastions of competition. Our college baseball team’s motto, for example, was “Compete at Everything.”
And this brought us into states of conflict not infrequently. I remember a full-blown shouting match and near-fight with a teammate in an offseason team indoor handball game — all because we were competing our balls off, and he did something to annoy me.
Am I proud of it? Not really. But I can see where that fire, and the capability to push into hyper-aggressive, could be necessary. It’s a high give-a-shit level.
Otherwise, treading water is all we can manage. All we can do is stave off the drowning.
And that’s a state of constant defense. Psychologically speaking, that’s just sitting in anxiety, praying for what you fear. Or in jiu jitsu, it’s sitting back and just trying to defend — no attacking.
There are countless domains that put you in that “push… or else” state. Rock climbing, running, swimming, mountain biking, jiu jitsu, the list goes on. Things with risk.
It seems the better we get at pushing the limits in any of those activities, the more capable we are, generally, to manage the noise and stress of daily life… defend against the drowning feeling — and push a pace.
