When I was a senior in high school, I stopped dressing for Phys. Ed. The school called my mother, who came to me and asked “Andrea, why have you stopped dressing for Phys. Ed?”
“Mom,” I responded, “I’ve dressed for Phys. Ed enough times and taken enough Phys. Ed classes that I need to pass. I’m not doing it anymore.”
I had forgotten all about this until I took a course on Positive Intelligence last fall and found out that among my “saboteurs,” the hyper-achiever ranked the lowest.
“You’ve always been an underachiever,” my mother said to me, noting that when I was in elementary school, I’d only answer as many questions on tests as I needed to pass. Then, I’d stop answering. (I guess you could say I mastered the concept of the “Minimum Effective Dose” pretty early in life.)
The thing is, I’m not an underachiever.
I am a marathon runner, and I’m probably more fit than the majority of people I went to high school with, people who continued back then to dress for Phys. Ed. I just didn’t see a point in investing energy into a standardized curriculum I had no interest in. If I could get to the endpoint, which was what I always was told was the goal, why would I invest more effort into something I didn’t care about, only to arrive at the same place as my peers?
In the West, we’re taught from young: learn the steps, take a test, advance, and get to “the top.” Yet, the “top” is a lie. The metaphor of a “ladder” is false. We’re more like the ocean, and that’s a hell of a lot more powerful than a ladder.
We’re not assembly line bots, yet society carves us out to be. Under the illusion of it all, except for the very innovative and curious who get slack from everyone the whole way, most of us just become pegs in the hole.
I wish someone taught me when I wasn’t dressing for Phys. Ed. the tremendous lessons I would learn as an athlete.
I wasn’t an athlete before 2017. I smoked cigarettes since I was 14 years old and I ate cheese fries. You’d find me hanging off a barstool until 4:00 a.m. at O’Lunney’s Times Square Pub, most nights and during that time, I had ZERO positive coping mechanisms for the unpredictability of life.
Being an athlete taught me to push past discomfort, and it taught me the sheer gratitude that one can feel when their body proves itself capable, defying the odds, running another mile when it wants to quit.
It taught me the need for mindfulness and prayer.
It taught me about connecting with other humans.
Even in a solitary sport like running, every athlete toes the start line and stands together for the national anthem.
It taught me about connection to source, and connection to self. I learned that they are the same thing.
If I hadn’t been sold the bill of goods that an endpoint exists, I may have learned sooner that life is not meant to race there.
It wasn’t about “passing Phys. Ed.” It was about experiencing the gift of my body.
It’s like dancing or playing a piece of music. We don’t do it to finish. We do it to feel.
We all have such magic inside of us, and we don’t realize that an arbitrary set of rules often hinders us from accessing it.
We don’t realize that there is nowhere but here.
There is no time but now.
