The Forgotten Ambitions
When you look around, you’d guess that the desire to be attractive drives all human motivation. It goes well beyond looking good. It’s becoming what you think other people want you to be. It’s harboring secrets so intensely that the facade you put out becomes your truth. The mask becomes permanent. You drift from masquerade to masquerade showing off this lavish costume, not being able to recognize yourself when you look in the mirror.
But there are three ambitions of the human condition:
- the soul wants to DO good
- the ego wants to LOOK good
- the body wants to FEEL good
To be completely transparent, I am fully aware of the benefits having a strong body has afforded me: it allowed me to excel at athletics, got people to listen to me, and has made me unafraid of being in physical harm. Those are some pretty big perks. Especially that last one. But my ego broke that body. I willingly punished it through sport. I was too ambitious to let it heal. Nobody high-fived me after clamshells. Coaches, fans, and teammates only cared about how you played, not how you felt afterwards. Pain wasn’t a badge of honor. It was a sign of egotistical ignorance.
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| photo credit: lifethroughfitness.files.wordpress.com Don’t believe the hype. |
I took a lot of drugs to make my body feel good. The temporary fix encouraged me to keep playing and keep causing harm. If I wasn’t an athlete I had no idea who I was. Somewhere along the line, though, I stopped being able to fool myself. I realized that it was natural that the specialness of teammates lasted only as long as you played. I no longer thrived off competition. I started longing for regular. To get there, I had to rethink some things. I had to redefine what my talents were. I had to fix my body. I refocused my eager-to-practice energies into getting smarter. If I could train my body to perform better, I was sure I could figure out how to get a dysfunctional body to function.
So I did.
In paying attention to what my body wanted, I found my soul’s ambition:
Which leads us to here. People in pain are looking for answers. They begin the quest by looking outside of themselves. This site is my attempt to serve. There is absolutely nothing better for the soul than to help someone. So put your thoughts, ideas, and talents out there. They will find the need. Don’t worry about judgement or what people might say. The people that dog you are not the people you are meant to reach. Know what you have to give, and that it’s worth sharing. To get better at giving, pick something small, and start. We’re all good at something, and we ourselves might be that one thing the world needs.