The Arm Out of the Sleeping Bag

Thoughts on doing hard things.

It’s not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who’s face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in the worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Teddy Roosevelt.

I think about this quote a lot. On the big scale I’m trying to accomplish a lot during this life. On the small scale I try every day. I’m not sure if it’s a weakness & fault, or a positive attribute, but sitting idly by as time passes isn’t something I’m particularly good at. I have a hard time doing nothing. If I’m not working on work, I’m writing. If I’m not writing, I’m editing photos. If I’m not editing photos, I’m taking photos. If I’m not taking photos I’m exercising. If I’m not exercising, I’m reading. If I’m not reading, I’m…. I’m not very good at doing nothing until bedtime. Then in theory I tell myself I just want to watch a show and chill. Something like Northern Exposure, to lighten my brain and make me laugh. But more often than not I fall asleep in the first ten minutes. It’s the way I operate. And like I said, sometimes I think it’s a fault. I hold an admiration for people that can watch a sports game from start to finish. I don’t have that sort of leisure in my ability.

Don’t get me wrong. I love to sit and think. But more often than not, I’ll still grab a pen and paper and scribble it down as the thoughts pass through. It’s been this way since high school. I have a voice that is vocal inside my brain. The Inner Dialogue. For years it somewhat haunted me. Then sometime in my mid twenties I came to peace with it. Learned to embrace it. Started more actively giving it room. Writing wasn’t fast enough. It required typing. I’m fast at typing. My brain likes typing speed.

Sometime during my thirties I told myself that the Inner Dialogue needs to shut up a little. Sometimes it made me speak too soon. Sometimes I made me not hear a thing other people were saying. I’m the opposite of ADHD. I have a rather extreme ability to focus. I am able to sit and concentrate for hours at a time on a thing. I love it. I love to focus in on a thing. But in my thirties as the kids were beginning to speak and converse and my Inner Dialogue was vying for attention I put a muffler on it. Not really. It was still there, but I learned to ignore it. Learned to step outside my mind and really focus on what my wife and kids were saying. Most of the time anyway. Ok, some of the time anyway. But it was an improvement, socially. And a necessary one for someone trying to remain an active and viable member of a family.

Writing itself has never been hard for me in the sense of coming up with words. My brain loves putting words on paper. It loves seeing them emerge on the page. BUT there is a challenge I’ve often faced, especially since I put the muffler on my mind… I know just how much I’m going to dive in once I get started, so I hesitate to start at all. This worked quite well for me for a number of years. I saw it as an advantage. When I had a window of time, usually a minimum of around an hour, I’d quick do the dishes to warm my hands up, give my brain time to step away from what had been going on, and then go grab my laptop and write. Anything less than a half hour felt worthless. It wasn’t even time to get rolling.

But life offers us each unique challenges based on who we are. Little kids, even big kids love to not need you for hours and hours when you are really there, mentally available and ready to do anything. But as soon as you sit down to take a half hour to yourself, to lose yourself in a book or writing, or anything of the sort, they will immediately sense it and become hungry. It’s like clockwork.

All those hours that you could have been working on the thing you wanted to do are gone, but now you actually have stuff you have to do. It is the way it plays out.

So slowly I started to grab the little windows. Fifteen minutes here. Fifteen minutes later. On longer writing pieces I might not dive into the actual writing but I’d make notes on what was going to happen next, or what needed to happen even later. Little scenes. Big story changes. Or even new story ideas, scribbled in five minutes to then wait a few years before I get to them. I have at least 10 full story ideas in the waiting room right now.

When I was in my twenties just starting out writing, I had this notion that I was likely not going to be able to succeed because it seemed the most successful writers were tormented. They were sad, somber, alcoholics who dealt daily with inner demons. I’ve never felt I have inner demons. I have things I like working on, but I’ve never been overly enthusiastic about alcohol and I’ve always viewed health as a gateway to better thinking. But sometime around thirty I realized the true struggle for most writers is time. Life gets busy. Add kids to the mix and it becomes exponentially more busy. Add building a home, building a business… it just gets more and more complicated, even for those of us that are trying to keep it simple. What you eventually realize, writer or not, is that life is in fact hard. It is hard around the globe for everyone everywhere.

We see people on the news and in social media and the default story told is that the more a person has, the easier it is. But it’s bullshit. Having does not get rid of challenge, it simply shifts the challenge. There is always challenge. And it’s the reason I strive to never compare myself to anyone but myself. You see someone with “more” and I promise, they have things unseen in their inner life that are every bit as hard as you have it. Just different. For everyone. Life is hard.

But that is not the point. The point is that being hard isn’t what need to stop us. It is not that we have to get up and face another day. It is embracing the perspective that we get to wake up and face another day. Look at this paragraph again. Pause a second.

Life is really short for us humans on earth. I wonder all the time if we get another go around here or elsewhere, but for all the wondering I’ve done about that, all I come back to is we won’t know until we get there. But we have this one. We know this one. We are living it right now, right here. We get to live it right now, right here. What are we going to do.

And here is where I want to make a disclaimer. Just because I am a busy minded person does not by any means make me think that everyone else should be. In fact, as I stated, I actually think it at times is a detriment to the way I operate on earth. But I’ve come to face the fact that my mind likes to go. It loves projects. Lots of them. It loves writing. It loves photography. I loves editing video. It loves moving through the woods. It loves driving across the country. I love motion. I love images, both in word and illustrative. It loves creating. Absorbing. But that is my mind. I’d never expect anyone else to operate like I do. My wife is different. My friends are different. My kids are different. But what I do know, is that across the board we all face challenges, from external forces and internal chemistry. Our minds usually offer the largest challenges of all. And the one trick I’ve found in life that gets me through them, is leaning into them, leaning forward not back. I don’t like putting a hard thing off til tomorrow. I’d rather stay up late and deal with it tonight. I always prefer to get the hardest part done first.

This brings me back to the quote above. There are a lot of critics in this life. I hope to never be one of them. When I hear people making fun of a song, or criticizing a book, a piece of art, or even a business someone has started my immediate thought is stfu. A book, a song, a piece of art, a business, anything built takes work. And when people take pride in their work it is a beautiful thing. I don’t care if we are talking about a well crafted book, or an intricate plumbing system. Good work is impressive because someone took the time to do what they were doing well. All in. And that is worthy of admiration. And anyone who has tackled these hard things knows mistakes will be made. We’ve all made tons of them. My first book is, and pardon my french, shit. It’s chaos. It’s something I’ll probably never show another soul, and to the one or two people I’ve shown, if you are out there, I’m sorry. I was eager. It was not ready. I shouldn’t have wasted your time. But there it was.

I don’t have time for the critics in life. They try to steal the energy created by others who have put their energy out there creating and doing hard things. But I strive to admire the people creating work. Even if I don’t like it, I can admire the energy they have put into. Even if it is not my style, or I can think how I might do it differently, I strive to admire the effort they have put into it. And while there are clearly half assed things done all the time, those are not the works that shine, and it’s obvious. Some people are just getting by. I won’t judge that. I probably won’t even be drawn to it. That is chaff in the wind. But when you see thing that has been worked on, it is a thing of beauty even when it’s not. The enthusiasm is worthy of praise. The devotion it takes to finish a thing, is worthy of applause. And in many ways, even more so for the people doing their thing from the trenches without accolades or prestige. A cabinet built by someone who wants to learn, and does it, and it’s imperfect, I’m impressed. That person took the effort to learn a new thing, to make mistakes, to carry on. And if they liked the process I hope they will do it again, because it will only get better with each round. I hold much more admiration for that person than the one that decides it is too hard, and never starts.

Hard is good. Hard is an inevitability of life. Just as joy, love, and friendship, challenges are just part of the game. We can lean forward or try to hide, but the more we lean towards the challenges, the less daunting they become.

The last few years as the kids have gotten older and more independent a funny thing has happened. The Inner Dialogue has resurfaced. I honestly wondered, after years of holding it back, if perhaps it had weakened, its muscles had atrophied. But as it has reemerged I’ve been able to embrace it again in full force. I have the bandwidth for it again. I also have learned how to work with it and approach it as an asset, a strength, and not worry about the social mishaps and isolation it can create. I luckily have an understanding family and a few close friends that get this about me. Sometimes my mind is working on its own thing. It does not listen well. It can be across the room and a hundred miles away all once. I work on that. But I also know that this thing that was once hard to deal with is an asset. I lean into it. It has it’s place. I’ve learned to insert more patience and focus into it. It is doubtful that this will ever go away. And I like that. Gnothi seauton, know thyself. (I don’t know Greek, so I’m going out on a limb here) - I think I know what that means now. It’s part quest, but also part acceptance. It is not only a question of knowing yourself individually, but what it is to be human. To know yourself is to evaluate and know what you want to do in this life. It is to not compare yourselves to what others are doing or have done, but to have your own ambitions, goals, and ways of approaching your day. They will not look like anyone else’s. They do not need to. It is the individual you. But to be human is also to face challenge of being human, a commonality across our species. It is to experience pain and pleasure. The thing we share with all humanity. One is not good, the other bad, but rather, both simply are. All of the experiences are human. We all face them differently, but we all face them. That is humanity.

“With great risk comes great reward.” When I look up this quote, it says it comes from Max Brooks writing on Minecraft, which seems strange for me, but I know the quote and it sits in my mind. When I’m thinking about hard things, things that often turn out far less challenging except in the mental space as I approach them, I often ask myself, what is it that makes this challenge seem so insurmountable? What is it that is so hard? More often than not, it is getting started that is the hardest thing. But not always. Maybe that is more true of mental challenges than physical ones.

Mental challenges we hold out in front of ourselves and stall, for some sort of fear. I face it writing every day. And I think I’ve come to the conclusion that these types of hard challenges are caused by a fear that I won’t be able to do what I’m setting out to do. Get coherent words to the page. To finish the project. To have it make sense. But there are certainly other challenges too, and physical ones we often do not know just how hard it is going to be until we are in it. I think here of climbing a mountain. Of trekking the kids across Nepal. Both writing and trekking are hard. But different. Both require diving in with full commitment… and, perhaps most to the point here, like almost all hard things we decide to pursue and delve into, great reward comes in the satisfaction of knowing we did the thing. Some of life’s best memories and most worthwhile experiences are ones we are afraid to approach and afraid to dive into. But that is the reward of life. And as the quote that begins this all says, “who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

This is in fact the very essence of value in life. In an age when we are told to avoid hard things at all cost, to take the easy and safe path, we are tempted to forego one of the very greatest essential pleasures of life, overcoming obstacles and hardship. No challenge is so great as the moment we first encounter it. And with resolve, when the thing has finally ended, short of death, what does not kill us does in fact make us stronger. In an age when we are told there are so many shortcuts, I wonder, what is the point of the short cut. I want to take the long way. I want the path that goes over the mountain. I want to swim across the river. I want to push more into the things were I feel the pleasure and pain, because life is not about shortcuts, but is about doing and experiencing. Hard work need not be a drudgery on our days, but a game we play with the universe. Hard work is in fact what builds the character we hope to bring out in ourselves. I’m not suggesting that there are not other life pleasures beyond the hard, the grit, the challenge, but only that these things are in balance with the easy pleasures and coasting we sometimes come across. There is no light without dark. There is no pleasure without pain.

I’m reminded of one last anecdote that I should probably write separately about some day, but I think it fits nicely here as well. When I was 19 I spent a summer in the mountains of Wyoming on a NOLS course. In the first month we were deep in the Wind River Mountains. Days were exhausting. Nights were cold. We climbed mountains in the snow. We endured swarms of mosquitos. We had blisters. We crossed icy streams hiking the rest of the day soaking wet and cold only to be burned by the sun on our faces. It is where I discovered the pleasures and hardships of mountains. And I fell in love. I fell in love with sore muscles, cold air, wet feet, and all the elements from sunshine to snow that mountains offer.

At night I would crawl into my navy blue Moonstone sleeping bag laying with only a cheap piece of foam between me and the granite earth beneath me, and lie under the open sky staring up through the branches into the Milky Way. I’d lay there in wonder at how warm I felt. How alive all the pain and pleasure made me feel. How lucky I was to be breathing it in, existing under these stars, surrounded by this earth I’d not even begun to explore in earnest.

That bag is still one of my favorite cocoons. I was so warm and had nothing more to do with my day, body done, energy spent, no more to do, no more to give, but mind alive like never before. Laying there I’d put my arm out of the sleeping bag just to feel the cold again before going to sleep. The ying and yang. The Arm Out Of The Sleeping Bag. The warm, the cold. It became my own personal life philosophy I’ve lived by and reminded myself of ever since. The bitter and sweet. The light and the dark. C.S. Lewis said: “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” They go so well together and you only truly know one when you’ve experienced both. The hard things in life not only teach us about overcoming them, but teach us about the other side of the spectrum. You can not have one part of life without the other.

I still have the same sleeping bag all these years later. It’s lost a bit of loft, but is still my favorite. I still love to sleep out in the open under the full sky. I still put my arm out, if even for just a few minutes to just feel it, to feel the difference, the cold arm countered by the warm body. To embrace it. To remind myself how good I have it, just to be alive. Just to be.

Thanks for reading along. I appreciate getting to share this with you.