Three questions for the end of the day

Back in my angry, bitter, post-undergrad days I was really tired of being surrounded by people who couldn't keep their shit together. Seriously, this life is not that hard. Step 1: Get some skills in something and get a job. Step 2: Try to show up and not fail at your job and you should have enough money to do something fun after hours. Step 3: Don't be an asshole (maybe this should be step 1.)

So many people fail at these easy steps... but I'm over it now.

Somewhere in my journey I realized that this philosophy was doing me great harm. It would be great if the world was so simple: Show up to life, work hard, and be rewarded or don't and be a failure. Too bad nothing is that simple.

People have their own challenges. Now when I look at other people I don't give a damn how their paychecks compare to mine or how big their houses are or how well they measure up to my old standards of success. Instead, I look at how they deal with little things. Do they treat others with dignity? Do they pause to appreciate beauty in the world? Do they learn from failure or make excuses?

This has made me a much nicer person. Until I realize I still beat myself up over my old standards of success.

Now at the end of the day, I ask myself those same questions. 

Did I treat others with dignity? 

Did I pause to appreciate what was beautiful? 

Did I learn from failure or did I make excuses?

Before I wrote this, I was sinking into a bad mood. Late at night its so easy to feel alone and weak. Its so easy to trivialize the day's work as I look ahead and see how far away my goals still are. But on this day I did not fail my three questions.

Two (very minor) BJJ victories

Really, I should have better things to do at 2AM. Things like sleeping. But here I am, rambling away.

For my own record, I am going to celebrate two BJJ victories from this week. People should celebrate progress more often. Rest assured that I am beating myself up about my failures outside of this blog, but I like to keep this space positive whenever possible.

Today I had a drills class that was based on mount. Given my size, weight, and skill level, that meant I spent most of my time in class trying to escape. Maybe at some point I'll get into stories about what worked and what didn't work technique-wise, but for now I'm focusing on mindset. The victory for me here is that I kept trying. Its so easy to just pause for a minute when I'm tired, even when that's the worst thing I can do. So I said I wasn't going to do that, I would keep fighting until something worked and I didn't care if that meant suffering through an entire 5 minute round barely able to breathe as I fought off every submission attempt. It was fun, but ow. I needed a 3 hour nap after class before I could move again. However, I'm tougher than I thought. I will try to do that all the time now.

Second victory was Thursday. The normal class is focused on takedowns for the next month or whatever. It was time to confront that fear of falling that follows me around making me all tense and disturbing my aura of somewhat calm. I survived. Not the most glamorous victory, but I'll take it. Kudos to fellow white-belt Scott for being very patient and helpful and for being just nice enough that I learned a ton and just mean enough that I had to face my fear. Seriously, its hard to explain striking that kind of balance, but I know what it feels like and I respect the training partners that can do it that much more.

On a related note I have extra special leg bruises - see! I'm thinking about going as a leopard for Halloween.