Raptitude.com

A history buff friend of mine said that the art of medieval fencing was lost completely. At some point, the last person who really knew how to do it had died.

There are old treatises that describe the art, and people have learned a lot from them, starting historical fencing clubs and instructional YouTube channels. But embodied artforms like fencing can’t be translated entirely into books and then come out again intact. There are subtleties that can only be transmitted by a living teacher to a living student.

Much of this expertise will never be rediscovered, because nobody needs to get really good at sword fighting anymore. It’s a hobby – no one’s life or legacy depends on mastering this skill, and so the best of it, whatever it was, is gone.

I find this idea of lost knowledge haunting, and I think of it whenever go into Shopper’s Drug Mart, where the art of eye contact between cashier and customer seems to have been lost to time. No matter what you do, they just don’t look at you. If they look up at all, their gaze points off at nothing, somewhere to the side of your head, while they say thank you and give you your receipt without a glimmer of friendliness.

By the time you’re three or four years old, you’ve already learned the tremendous value of dishonesty.

Even if you were the one who unrolled all the toilet paper onto the floor, you know it’s possible for your parents to believe it was someone else, and that’s a better outcome for you. So you say you didn’t do it, hoping they adopt this false version of reality and never know the difference.

The truth is a useful and beautiful thing, but it easily comes in conflict with other interests, namely feeling safe from unwanted forms of attention, or getting others to do things for you.

Deception – or at least, putting truth second to other interests — is instinctive. I have a clear memory of being six years old, playing in the town pool with one of my friends. We were talking about how deep the water was, and he said that his dad could touch the bottom because he was seven feet tall. I said my dad could too, because he was eight feet tall.

Now, I didn’t actually know how tall my dad was, but I knew he probably wasn’t a whole foot taller than Wilt Chamberlain. Why did I say that? I guess felt I was being challenged in some way, and that it was important to counter my friend’s aggressive claim of father-height superiority. I didn’t feel like I was lying exactly. The accuracy of what I was saying just didn’t seem particularly important.

I’ve been taking cold showers for a few weeks now, and I’m surprised how quickly I’ve adapted. Now I can stand there, with almost no discomfort, in water that would make me shiver involuntarily just eight or ten showers ago.

According to the cold shower nerds I follow, it’s important not only to make the water cold, but to avoid bracing yourself against the cold, both mentally and physically. You want to just let it hit you. Don’t hunch your shoulders, don’t hug yourself for warmth, don’t make anguished faces.

If the water is too cold, and you react uncontrollably, you dial back the intensity a bit. You find that state of non-resistance in yourself, then try to achieve it at a cooler temperature next time.

There’s something about this simple practice that’s empowering — nearly immediately so — and it applies to much more than cold water.

There’s a particular scene in an early episode of the Simpsons that I found especially relatable, as a ten-year-old whose main interest was candy. Bart and Lisa wake up the morning after Halloween, so miserable from eating sweets that they can’t even look at their candy pile. When Marge suggests giving the rest of it to needy children, they protest, flop onto the candy pile to protect it, and begin miserably eating more.

I had noticed by then that the deliciousness of candy was highly variable. The first Twizzler or mouthful of Nerds tasted the best. The delight fell off steadily after that, although I would almost always finish whatever I’d bought with my allowance.

At that age, my candy consumption was usually only limited by my budget. However, I knew from Halloween’s annual windfalls that you could eat enough candy to reach a state where the magic is basically gone, and all that remains is a harsh sugariness. It’s clear the party’s over, yet some part of you still wants to continue gobbling toffees and Tootsie Rolls.

This is because, even though pleasure is basically gone by then, eating another candy still gives a faint hint of the initial deliciousness. It’s like you’ve already squeezed all the juice out of an orange or a lemon, but you can always give the empty rind another hard squeeze, and wring out one more drop.

Last year I bought a strength training program from a Canadian bodybuilder named Jeff, and it kind of made me better at everything.

The program was designed for people who don’t have much time to train – busy people cramming 35-minute workouts into lunch breaks. Because you only have time for one or two working sets per exercise, you have to make each set really good. The usual effort won’t do for these precious few sets – each one has to be high quality and high intensity.

High intensity, in a strength training context, means you do enough repetitions that you’re flirting with muscle failure — the point where your muscles physically cannot move the weight another inch.

The author insists that people almost always overestimate how close their normal effort gets them to this max-out point. You might feel like you would fail on the next rep, but if you test that assumption by continuing anyway, you find you can actually do two, three, even four more before you really hit the wall.

I started focusing on these extra reps as the whole point of the workout, and immediately started getting better results than I had in all my years of gym-going.

I forget who pointed this out, but Netflix has a subtle feature where it periodically tries to inspire you to get off the couch and live the life you really want.

Whenever an episode of the show you’re watching ends, and the next is queueing up, there’s a moment in which the screen goes black, allowing you to glimpse your own reflection. When you see your own tired, expectant face, about to invest another 47 minutes of your precious life rewatching The Mentalist, you have a fleeting chance to save yourself.

Whether you’re a binge-watcher or a doomscroller or some other type of time-bider, the following is probably true for most people reading this:

You spend your life doing things. Some of the things you do make themselves happen, and some don’t.

Sweeping the floor, even if you don’t love doing it, will eventually make itself happen, because you’ll get annoyed by walking through filth every day.

Same with things like getting groceries, sleeping, taking out the garbage, and getting dressed. Whether or not you’re excited to do these things, not doing them quickly becomes intolerable, so they get done.

Certain activities also make themselves happen out of habit more than necessity, such as flipping on the TV, slipping out your phone, or checking email. The mind and body are primed to do these things without conscious effort.

We can call all of these self-triggering actions default activities. You’ll do them unless you try not to, because they’re the actions the current conditions of your life drive you to do. You’re not going to let the years slip by without ever getting around to buying groceries or tying your shoes.

Bananas used to be a lot more difficult to eat than they are now. The seeds were huge and plentiful, and ran throughout the flesh of the fruit, which itself was starchier, stringier, and less sweet.

Other foods were similarly obtuse. Watermelons, for example — instead of having contiguous pink flesh throughout, the good part was hiding in small, seed-riddled segments divided by thick white rind. Pre-modern corn was much smaller, and the kernels had tough outer shells. Meat would be tough and sinewy, and you might have to enter mortal combat in order to get it.

Basically, everything used to be like a pomegranate, at least figuratively: full of rinds and membranes and hard bits, requiring some work to get at the good stuff. Not by coincidence, chronic overeating was rare.

I was thinking about this as I drove home from the gym the other day, just before lunchtime. There’s a McDonalds on my route, and it’s basically the inverse of a pomegranate — getting to the goods has been made as easy as possible. There’s a wide, funnel-like approach coming from the street, inviting even the largest vehicle to enter easily. Arrows direct you into either of two parallel drive-thru lanes, so the line is usually only a car or two long. At this point all you have to do is say “Bring me a cheeseburger!” and they say “Yes, at once!” Then you advance down the one-way funnel and someone literally puts the burger into your hand. You touch your card to some electronic thing and unseen computers settle the monetary side of the transaction.

Your mind is always pointed at something, and it matters what it is.

If you spent most of your day preoccupied with thoughts about a past failed relationship, for example, that makes for a different kind of day than one in which you’re preoccupied with solving a computer programming problem. Your mood, your actions, and the tone and feel of your life depend hugely on what’s on your mind.

As you know if you read this blog, the mind can focus on things other than thoughts; you can attend to present-moment sense phenomena. Even a few seconds of this at a time can break the momentum of thinking.

For the most part, though, if you’re a human being living in the modern world, chances are your attentional bandwidth is going to be dominated by thinking. There’s just too much in the environment drawing us into abstract world of thought. Every glimpse of entertainment, advertisement, news, gossip, or content is a seed that can set off an open-ended, self-sustaining weather system of thinking and feeling.