Real and Unreal Victories ($)

Are you ready to take control of the reality that affects your mental health?

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread, than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”—W. H. Auden

Manufacturing Consequences

I’ve never been an athlete, and I’ve never had much respect for athletics. Athletics' contrived risks and rewards put me off. It’s hard enough discerning what’s important when you’re engaged with reality; how can you straighten out your priorities in a world where priorities are invented?

Then I became a mountaineer and found a world that is, if not more real, then more consequential. It’s consequences that count, not what you think is real. This might seem like an adolescent attitude, but it’s the right attitude for growing up at any age.

Mountaineering became my touchstone for reality: life and death under natural conditions. The victories were contrived, but the dangers weren’t. Everything I did was of consequence and no time was wasted. Mountaineering was an abrupt education.

Now that I’m older, I find time to be the arbiter of truth, not danger. With every passing moment, I ask myself, “Am I best using the time that is constantly being irretrievably lost?”

Manufacturing Commitment

I approached marriage as I approached mountaineering: committed partnerships with the risk of failure and the prospect of victory. This sort of full-on commitment is common among mountaineers, but it’s not how other people think. Relationships are mostly unreal. There is no consensus about what makes up success or failure. 

You’d think relationships would be taken seriously, like a serious athlete takes their sport, but most people approach relationships like a card game: bluff if you’re challenged, exit the game if your hand is weak. If relationships were approached as opportunities rather than recreation, then more would be made of them. There would be fewer conflicts and evasions.

Two failed marriages acquainted me with the legal system. It taught me law is not about creating justice, it’s about limiting injury. Sharing a grounded reality resolves conflicts, and being grounded starts in the body. People can be entirely lost in their own worlds, especially where relationships are concerned. Emotionally lost people are out of their bodies.

Relationships, ‌and marriages in particular, are invitations to form commitments, but this is overlooked. Neither of my former partners took our marriages seriously, and I was too immersed in commitment to notice.

Most of my counseling clients are struggling to clarify commitment in their lives. It’s not preparation or aptitude that determines success, it’s commitment. Before you can commit to action, you have to have priorities that you believe in. You have we know what’s important.

Change is the Opposite of Structure

---

If you’re interested in your self-improvement, then schedule a free conversation with me. Select a time on my online calendar at:

https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/schedule15.