So, with that I have the excuse to spend hours reading about training, nutrition, and anything else that seems pertinent.
A subcategory I stumbled upon was researching the multitude of ways that chronic stress slowly debilitates and eventually kills you and what to do about it.
I took a few notes on things like the impact of exercise on stress hormone levels - Put a rat under stress and allow him to run freely on a wheel and his glucocorticoid levels go down, for example. Take the same rat, though, and force him to do the same amount of exercise and his glucorticoid levels rise even higher.
All fascinating stuff, but one that I keep flipping back to is a footnote that included following a section on people with "Type A" tendencies and the resulting effects of their chronically activated stress responses:
There is an analogy that comes from the world of games. It was used quite some time ago by a psychologist named James Dobson. I first learned it from my grandmother. My grandmother taught me how to play the game monopoly. Now, my grandmother was a wonderful person. She raised six children. She was a widow by the time I knew her well. She lived in our house for many, many years. And she was a lovely woman, but she was the most ruthless Monopoly player I have ever known in my life. Imagine what would have happened if Donald Trump had married Leona Helmsley and they would have had a child. Then, you have some picture of what my grandmother was like when she played Monopoly. She understood that the name of the game is to acquire.
When we would play when I was a little kid and I got my money from the bank, I would always want to save it, hang on to it, because it was just so much fun to have money. She spent on everything she landed on. And then, when she bought it, she would mortgage it as much as she could and buy everything else she landed on. She would accumulate everything she could. And eventually, she became the master of the board.
And every time I landed, I would have to pay her money. And eventually, every time she would take my last dollar, I would quit in utter defeat. And then she would always say the same thing to me. She’d look at me and she’d say, “One day, you’ll learn to play the game.” I hated it when she said that to me. But one summer, I played Monopoly with a neighbor kid–a friend of mine–almost every day, all day long. We’d play Monopoly for hours.
And that summer, I learned to play the game. I came to understand the only way to win is to make a total commitment to acquisition. I came to understand that money and possessions, that’s the way that you keep score. And by the end of that summer, I was more ruthless than my grandmother. I was ready to bend the rules, if I had to, to win that game. And I sat down with her to play that fall.
Slowly, cunningly, I exposed my grandmother’s vulnerability. Relentlessly, inexorably, I drove her off the board. The game does strange things to you. I can still remember. It happened at Marvin Gardens. I looked at my grandmother. She taught me how to play the game. She was an old lady by now. She was a widow. She had raised my mom. She loved my mom. She loved me. I took everything she had. I destroyed her financially and psychologically. I watched her give her last dollar and quit in utter defeat. It was the greatest moment of my life.
And then she had one more thing to teach me. Then she said, “Now it all goes back in the box–all those houses and hotels, all the railroads and utility companies, all that property and all that wonderful money–now it all goes back in the box.” I didn’t want it to go back in the box. I wanted to leave the board out, bronze it maybe, as a memorial to my ability to play the game.
“No,” she said, “None of it was really yours. You got all heated up about it for a while, but it was around a long time before you sat down at the board, and it will be here after you’re gone. Players come and players go. But it all goes back in the box.”
And the game always ends. For every player, the game ends. Every day you pick up a newspaper, and you can turn to a page that describes people for whom this week the game ended. Skilled businessmen, an aging grandmother who was in a convalescent home with a brain tumor, teenage kids who think they have the whole world in front of them, and somebody drives through a stop sign. It all goes back in the box–houses and cars, titles and clothes, filled barns, bulging portfolios, even your body.
I would consider myself one of those type A personality people who will practice like mad, hone the Machiavellian instinct, and develope a ruthless jugular-gripping style of game. After a few months away from MMA and jiu jitsu, all I have wanted is to get really good at grappling NOW. This would lead to some evenings where I leave class frustrated I haven't "done well enough" in my own mind. I found myself getting consumed in this fabricated competitiveness rather than enjoying my time training and appreciating the people around me. I guess at the end of the day as with anything those proverbial pieces "go back in the box" and all that is left is a memory.Look around you. Look at all the pieces you're accumulating and take them away for a minute to see what will remain. All you are left with is how you've lived: how you've played the game and the people you've been playing it with.
Are you happy with it?
