Misleading.
I think that the last post's headline was misleading. We received a thoughful comment from Sid that posed a good philosophical argument on the ephemeral nature of the material world. Reading it I realized that I'd missed conveying what I was trying to say because I didn't relate it back in any way. This had actually occured to me a couple of times after writing it and before reading Sid's comment. I'd meant to go back and address it.
What is real wasn't what I was after - intentionality was. While I agree with Sid that mastery in some ways is best achieved by not trying to achieve it, I do like the application and development of mastery as Leonard teaches it and I think that I can apply now. Or attempt to apply at least.
The last post began referencing the early abstraction of my view of the ride. It all felt so big and so foreign, a little like a dream and a little like a nightmare; both the monster in the closet and heaven at the same time. I could only try and imagine what it was 'really' like and the information I had on the race up until then was primarily subjective, broken into bits and moments, and all pretty fantastic. It was hard not to form a rather grand picture. But then things calmed down and slowly the dream became more and more 'real'. As the monotony and the drone and the road trip and the week of it were conveyed to me effectively by people who'd done it before the big began to settle, the abstract found a more familiar form in that I had an empirical understanding of some of its parts.
In the building of the transistor radio the inventor had a working knowledge of its parts and set to putting on paper how those parts would form a whole that would transmit sound through the air from a box smaller than it had been transmitted from before. From the imaged to the applied.
That is what RAAM is becoming for me and I intend to use Leonard's approach to help me bridge from the imaged demons-in-the-closet view of the race to the applied reality of Atlantic City sometime in mid-June.
And I'm still not over the fact that the wise words of Conan the Barbarian are going to help me do that.
What is real wasn't what I was after - intentionality was. While I agree with Sid that mastery in some ways is best achieved by not trying to achieve it, I do like the application and development of mastery as Leonard teaches it and I think that I can apply now. Or attempt to apply at least.
The last post began referencing the early abstraction of my view of the ride. It all felt so big and so foreign, a little like a dream and a little like a nightmare; both the monster in the closet and heaven at the same time. I could only try and imagine what it was 'really' like and the information I had on the race up until then was primarily subjective, broken into bits and moments, and all pretty fantastic. It was hard not to form a rather grand picture. But then things calmed down and slowly the dream became more and more 'real'. As the monotony and the drone and the road trip and the week of it were conveyed to me effectively by people who'd done it before the big began to settle, the abstract found a more familiar form in that I had an empirical understanding of some of its parts.
In the building of the transistor radio the inventor had a working knowledge of its parts and set to putting on paper how those parts would form a whole that would transmit sound through the air from a box smaller than it had been transmitted from before. From the imaged to the applied.
That is what RAAM is becoming for me and I intend to use Leonard's approach to help me bridge from the imaged demons-in-the-closet view of the race to the applied reality of Atlantic City sometime in mid-June.
And I'm still not over the fact that the wise words of Conan the Barbarian are going to help me do that.
posted by Christopher Bolton at 4:51 AM
1 Comments:
The narrator in John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire, a body builder, says you have to get obsessed and stay obsessed to achieve your goal. After reading all your blogs, I'd say you've got that part down. I do sense some understandable fear and trepidation lurking behind the scenes. Woowoo Charly would tell you to take them out, look at them a bit and then discard them. They are not nescessary for your journey.
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