Perhaps my favorite lesson so far while working on mindfulness is that the struggle is all that you’re allowed to own. Not that you don’t receive the benefit of practicing mindfulness but that’s not guaranteed. You put in the work and the results may come, if you’re lucky, or they may not. I’ve heard, hell, we’ve all heard, “you did your best” and I’ll be damned if younger me didn’t roll his eyes at that expression and look at me now. Crow tastes great. Pass the hot sauce.

Note: that featured pic is me focusing on my breath.

My take on that, I guess, is that the struggle is the bigger part of the process. Maybe it is the process. Check out this sweet clip from Shanghai Noon. As soon as I thought of ‘reaping the fruits of your labor’ I immediately thought of this scene below.

“Roy, you just blew shit out of our fruits.”

2:10 – 2:50 you gotta watch it

So I’m working on acknowledging (struggling hard) that you don’t necessarily get to enjoy the fruits of your labors. Take all of this training I’ve been doing lately. Perhaps I’ve been more focused on it, perhaps not. This is my half-assed rationalization of not training in the past- I’d train and get injured frequently. I’m fairly certain the injuries were from not practicing enough self-care, nutrition, or getting enough sleep but that’s in the past. So all I can do is ‘struggle’ and train and take care of myself and see if I don’t get injured by my next event. Or for life.

I’ve taken the “focus on your breath” portion of practice and have used whenever I can remember to. The best place is when you’re on the elevator at work. Sometimes it’s just you, alone with your thoughts, on a 30 second trip up (plus 10 seconds/floor if one person exits. Yes, I timed it.) or other people get on and nearly everyone just grabs their phone and reads whatever is cached on there. Now when I get on the elevator, if I notice I  grab my phone, I merely glance at the time and notifications and then enjoy the ride. If there are other passengers then I’ll just focus at a point on the wall ahead while feeling how my breathing is going. I don’t know if there are any fruits from this little experiment but if there are, I have yet to realize them.

Maybe that Gary Vee guy on the Internets is right, the struggle or hustle or grind or whatever you want to call it is what it’s all about. At least, that’s what he loves. Whether or not I grow to enjoy that aspect of life, I guess that’s how it goes. I reckon my next few weeks will be lots of ‘one more step’ and ‘one more breath’ or half-breath, as the case may be.

If you’ve made it this far, you can pretty much ignore everything I’ve written or ever said (in this post or in life). Basically, this whole post was so I could post that clip up above. This post was actually way better in my head. Maybe I’ll have to revisit this in the future and see how I can improve on it.

Links:

Shanghai Noon

Fruits scene