The Paradox of Effort
Why the easy is hard and the hard is easy
What is wisdom?
A funny thing keeps happening months after we’ve settled into our new home here in the Chicago North Shore suburbs, I keep finding more boxes of my books.
Last week two new big ones emerged from the final collection still waiting to be given a home. Right at the top of one was the book I knew was around but still left unfound. My book of ancient Eastern philosophy, including the Tao-Te-Ching by Lao Tzu.
For anyone who has ever ventured into the Tao, you’ll appreciate what happened when I opened up the book to where I marked it last. Part LXIII ‘Thinking in the Beginning” stood there. I’ve been talking about hard and easy efforts and this passage is all about the sage wisdom of recognizing the ‘hard in the easy’ and the ‘easy in the hard.’
In Taoist tradition, the one what can sense and act on this understanding of things possesses true wisdom.
“All difficult things in the world are sure to arise for a previous state in which they were easy, and all great things from one in which they were small….the sage see difficulty even in what seems easy, and so never has any difficulties”
Fascinating!
Now what does it mean when it comes to fitness?
Recognizing the hard in the easy
My philosophic aim is the deeply understand the nature of sport so individuals can properly practice them to get the most meaning out of their participation.
One inherent part of sports when properly practiced is the idea of striving towards excellence.
You must try hard, you must want to improve your skill, you need to care about the quality of your action.
But for most, exercise doesn’t scream excellence. Especially as adults who live lives more conducive to sitting around and getting bigger in body and smaller in spirit. It looks more like punishment, like a bunch of small things that will never amount to anything.
It’s a weight loss journey with lots of pounds to lose. It looks daunting at first, but can be accomplished through small incremental wins, stacked together, to produce dramatic results.
The same is true of body recompositions and improved health through consistent exercise. Sure, one workout after years of neglect won’t make a difference, but 100 of those workouts stacked together in 200 days, all being small individually, collate together into dramatic transformation of self.
Most important is how these transformations affect the mind and spirit. The mind rationally calculates the 10,000 steps needed to make a big change. It hopes to demoralize the spirit, so a shortcut can be found when it comes to effort. The mind subtly perceives the deep wisdom of the Tao here. That the easy things are REALLY the hard things. To start in an easy thing is to truly to commit to a hard thing over time, especially if the idea of excellence is part of the equation.
Now here’s how it works when we put that wisdom into action for your fitness and life.
Becoming wise in fitness
Understanding that small steps compound to create massive changes takes a leap of faith. You need to trust your aim, intuition, and execution. There needs to be objective wins along the way, but most important is fidelity to the subjective understanding of a process of progress.
Your own wisdom in exercise and fitness starts here. That all actions, no matter their size, connect and compound to create a composite whole.
If you desire a great transformation, to produce something excellent, from a state in which you are not currently proud, there is only one true way to take that journey.
In the fitness realm, that’s not taking Ozempic, getting cosmetic surgery, on engaging in fad diets or bootcamp style fitness rushes.
The only way to make it happen is to recognize the difficulty inherent in the first small steps of the journey. I wrote about taking these truly terrifying first steps last month, check out the article on ‘Taking Step One’ HERE.
Allow consistency of easy effort to compound while engaging in the hard effort of the longer journey. Each individual exercise session may seem ‘easy’ but the process of ‘staying true’ is more difficult than it seems. It’s why too many fall off their exercise programs after weeks instead of having them stick as lifelong habits.
So wisdom looks a lot like ‘never having difficulty’ in GETTING STARTED when it comes to fitness. The wise know that fitness as a lifelong habit is an extremely hard thing to achieve despite the first steps appearing to be simple and easy.
So to realize this wisdom, you have to make the hard thing into an easy thing by bringing love and enthusiasm into the equation. If you love the activity, you won’t find it difficult to show up again and again. And THAT is the real skill you need.
So the Tao, in it’s own strange way, aims us towards using the heart as a calibrating metric for meaning but also for execution.
Play sports you love.
Show up when it’s hard.
Reap the rewards sown over time.
That’s how you live deep wisdom through your fitness. And also how you solve a lot of the problems that get in the way of finally finding the right pieces to your fitness puzzle.
Happy Training Team!