Daily Musings No 11 — Capability, Consistency, and What Nature Taught Me About Community

Exercise is vital to development because it proves that you’re capable of things that previously felt impossible. When you lose weight you didn’t think you could lose. When you lift weights you didn’t think you could lift. When you run a marathon for the first time. It all unlocks something in your brain that says I’m capable of more than I thought I was, and where else in my life can I realize this?

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Everything is about consistency. Which means overcoming doing shit you don’t want to do when you don’t feel like doing it for the satisfaction of accomplishing a long term goal.

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You can spend your days wishing your life was something that it’s not. Or you can be grateful for what it is and work on making it what you wish. But there’s no point in just lamenting on everything it isn’t. 

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I realize that a lot of people might have a soft spot for a certain cause, but a lot of people fail to see the interconnectedness of all things, which leaves a lot of other causes off their radar. 

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Layers are important because they provide protection and support. I was assessing my garden and doing some clean up after a heavy snow storm well into spring, and I noticed that the same type of plant, a peony, in one location got crushed, and in a different location got away pretty much unscathed. One of them was left out in the cold with nothing even covering it (we ran out of covering material by the time we got to that one). The other peony we covered with black cloth, and it has a mature tree hanging over it. I realized that, black cloth aside, the tree hanging over the second peony acted as protection, catching most of the heavy snow fall and preventing it from ever reaching the plant. And I was kind of amazed when I realized that nature had designed itself this way.

I then realized that the support and protection goes the other way to. From the bottom up. Because a lot of the trees in my neighborhood had big branches and limbs snap off under the weight of the snow they were carrying. But in this moment in my garden it dawned on me that had the mature trees that are spaced out around my neighborhood, instead been in a densely packed forest, with other smaller trees and shrubs under them all the way down to the ground, that those branches that broke off would have instead been able to rest on those smaller trees and shrubs, and carried the weight together. Creating more resilience.

Everything just works better when you can rely on the tree below you and the tree above you to provide protection and support, and they can rely on you.

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You don’t have to rehearse how you’re going to say it. You could just remind yourself that you have to say something about that.