5: What is the Good Life

I am fortunate to live in a house owned by my partner, so we can make quite dramatic alterations to the rooms without having to worry about a landlord.

As a result of the carnage of lockdown, and since I enjoy working from home and think that the coronavirus guidance is going to make gyms even stranger than they already are, we have decided to turn the front room into a small gym that I can use with clients and we can use for our own training.

I have built the lifting platform to protect the floor and storage for the weights and other bits, and bought a lush adjustable bench, but I have been waiting for a month to receive the folding squat rack that is the sort of centrepiece of the whole space.

Every morning since I placed the order a month ago I have written in my diary about how excited I am about it arriving, and how I will then start training again and resume my glorious weightlifting career *ahem*.

After much pestering, it was due to be delivered yesterday. When it arrived, there were no J-hooks, making it pretty much useless. I tried contacting support but they had all signed off for the weekend.

I was surprised and disappointed with the enormous effect that this had on my mood. I sat on the floor feeling completely despondent.

I have been doing the philosopher Sam Harris’ 50-day introduction to meditation course, Waking Up, and I feel like maybe that and watching the Werner Herzog film ‘Wheel of Time’ has given me a bit of embarrassing perspective on this whole thing.

It seems quite bizarre to be so emotionally invested in a piece of equipment or arbitrary deadline that any disruption to that plan results in despair and inactivity. I know hundreds of bodyweight exercises that I could be cracking on with and am programming for clients in sparser situations, equipment-wise, with great success. I know how to effectively train with all sorts of limitations, but I still just sat on the floor and felt sad.

That said, it also seems completely normal. I think that there is a sort of fundamental magical thinking that I am really drawn to - it’s the power of a new year, or a new season, or a Monday; the ability to magically create a sort of threshold that changes everything when you cross it. It can be a wonderful tool for change but, of course, can also be a source of feelings of failure if “life happens” and things don’t go quite as planned.

I don’t know what I feel about this. I don’t like the idea of behaving completely rationally (and, as I understand, behavioural research suggests that’s not really possible anyway), but I am still drawn to the search for The Perfect Approach and I don’t like the idea of my intentions being waylaid by something that’s out of my control.

I want to write on a bit of a tangent for a moment but I hope the relationship to the above will make sense:

I read a letter in the New Statesman a couple of weeks ago that was critical of the casual use of the terms “the good life” or “the common good” in their political coverage:

“I would contend that conflict between ideas, theories and interests is germane to a free society. “The common good” and “the good life” represent at best wishful thinking, and the historical record suggests they too can become instruments of control. Meaning, ethics and hope spring from entering the contest; pessimism and servility flow from the refusal or inability to do so.

As Simone Weil wrote:

"The struggles between fellow citizens do not spring from a lack of understanding or goodwill; they belong to the nature of things, and cannot be appeased, but can only be smothered by coercion. For anyone who loves liberty, it is not desirable that they should disappear, but only that they should remain short of a certain limit of violence."

We must work towards a world arranged differently, but not via the search for “the common good”: rather through resolute, democratic struggle.”

It may be a bit of a leap to apply this concept to training, but that’s what my brain seems to have been doing recently, so I might as well go with it.

I have a tendency to think in ideals and veer in my own training from one “perfect approach” to another, in search of the good life. I can be critical of myself for this but plenty of learning, experience and good training occurs along the way. Reading the quote above has made me feel that there is value in this constant mediation. Even if my life is not perfectly “good”, it’s better than it has been as a result of this struggle.

I’m not sure that I believe that a lot of the above is true, I’m not sure that the connection between the rack stuff and the letter is obvious, it’s all extremely insignificant, and there’s lots to unpick in use of the word “better” etc., but that’s where my thinking has been at today.