Written by Aron O'Dowd on 24 July 2013.
Posted in Others.
I come from a family of what I would call “Over thinkers”.
I spent my youth making snap decisions and responses to a busy lifestyle, staring at the ceiling at night unable to go to sleep, churning through different scenarios over and over and over.
Rarely a time for internal silence. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. In fact, I thought it was a trait to be this busy mentally.
In more recent times, I recall getting a call from my mother telling me my younger teenage brother was driving her crazy at home. He’s up all night and can’t get out of bed in the morning. He’s regularly in bad humor, does nothing around the house and argues constantly with your father. He’s hanging around with the wrong crowd and I think it’s only a matter of time before he gets into trouble. I responded without thinking. “Mum… he’s 16 years of age. He needs to come in the door in the evening EXHAUSTED”.
It was the start of the Summer, and my brother was marched out to a farm outside our home town of Limerick in Ireland to join a horse riding school.
He resisted at first, but each morning he was driven out bright and early, and collected later in the evening. His resistance slowly subsided and he started to tell my Mum that there was no need to collect him until later in the evening as there was a lot going on to keep up with.
He was very good with the horses, and made friends quickly with the other students. He soon became the right hand man of the owner of the school, required to help other students, wash down the horses, feed them, clean out the stables, you name it, he was doing it. Then it was time to go horse jumping at major competitions around the country. He started to bring home ribbons from horse jumping competitions he won. My mother recalls how when she would pick him up to bring him home in the evenings, he would fall asleep in the car. Her beautiful teenage son was back. He slept all night, was bright as a button in the morning time and ready for horse riding all over again the next day.
I write about this now because I read Tynan’s post on Friday “The Basics” about isolating the important things in life to get good at that would have the greatest return in ones performance and general contentment.
Meditation was at the top of his list. For over thinkers like me, meditation can be a an elusive concept. But I tripped over a sequence of activities that had a big impact in my own life’s contentment.
The first being Exercise. I started playing racket ball with friends and quickly became addicted to it. I played 3 times a week after work in the evening times, and it transformed my state of mind. For some reason, I was more relaxed than I was without exercise. I also had an air of confidence I didn’t have before. I seemed to walk that bit taller… not with arrogance, but I felt like I was more in tune with myself. Racket ball is also a team sport. I mention this because running and working out in the gym isn’t as enjoyable for me as racket ball is.
The second big impact for me was food. Now that I was exercising so regularly, my natural appetite changed. I seemed to change my likes and dislikes of food automatically without making a conscious decision about it. I was drinking more water, eating more selectively. But not because I was dieting or on a program or a plan. It was like I loaded a different .exe file and was running a different application than the usual one… a healthier one at that.
The third was my schedule. I seemed to start getting more organized in my day to day activities. Not because I decided to get more organized, but because I seemed to become more organized without a lot of effort on my behalf. I seemed to be that bit less chaotic and irked by things not going my way.
The penny dropped for me when I lay in bed one night a short time after I started playing racket ball. I lay there, quietly, eyes open…. and a short time later noticed for a moment that I was completely silent in my mind. Of course noticing this was an interruption. But this was absolutely new to me. Over the course of the following weeks, something amazing and new started to regularly occur. In bed before sleep, I would enter what I call a vacuum or a void. A place of expanse that had a sense to it that came from my chest. Eyes closed, breathing at the slowest pace, a single point of focus would appear in my mind’s eye…. a dot….Stillness…. and later a vertical line would appear like clock-work out of the darkness. A few moments later it explodes like a bomb blast.
I won’t go any further in my description. But I do want to point out that for me, physical exercise was the starting point for a new and very positive experience.
I think Exercise is the birthing place for the ability to focus, to become silent, to live more in the moment, to see the brighter side of life, to concentrate better, to have a more balanced view, to eat better, to sleep better, causing our lives to be that bit less chaotic.