The Body

We are provisioned with but one body. Just one.

The body is foundational, required for everything we hope to experience and pursue in life. It is our life’s vessel, and without it there can be no experience. The body, the mind, the soul – each lean upon and profoundly affect each other. While much of who you are and much of what you become extends beyond your physical manifestation, your body and how you care for it is an incredibly significant indication of who and what you are. It is the physical you, your physical form. Honor it. Not all bodies are alike, to be sure, but I truly believe that a person has a duty to themselves – and a duty to everyone around them – to nurture and strengthen their body toward its apex potential.

The body is capable of magnificent feats. Since I was a boy, I’ve wondered (daily) why anyone would not want to make their body as strong and as capable as it could be. Why would anyone not want to find out what they can do? Every neglected body I saw was to my eyes an incredible gift that someone discarded, rejected, knowingly or not. This was confusing, vexing even. While I was exposed and naturally inclined to sports and athleticism and various such programs as a young child, I can remember vividly adopting a personal and regular strength training routine in the evenings in the garage of our house since I was around thirteen years old. My parents had bought a weight set years prior, and what I saw in that rack of weights were the instruments and gateway to transformation, mutation, extension. I made that garage, and the grid of run-ready suburban streets around me, a crucible of physical ascent. It was hard, but the benefits were extraordinary. The progress was so simply measurable, observable, and spun a flywheel of compounding psychological energy as a result. So many people fantasize about super-human strength, they write stories and celebrate the mythical heroes, and curiously along the way, they barely explore their own physical potential. It is there for you, waiting to be unleashed. You are more powerful than you know. Take flight.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine you were born with a mind capable of extraordinary calculation, and imagine someone told you with certainty that as long as you exercised that mind consistently, it was within your capacity to reach elite thinking ability. Would you say, “Oh, well that’s a nice option, I suppose, but I don’t think I’ll develop that thing, not even a little bit, not even sure I need the ability to read and write.” This is the same option presented to you with your body – would you truly just let it atrophy over a lifetime, or would you see what it can really do?

In modern days, much of why one would neglect the body’s development over their time, never stretching it, is due to a sneaky misunderstanding of its value. Much of what humans engage during this period of our evolution, and much of what is needed for basic contemporary survival, requires barely more of the body than what technologists would call a “minimum viable product.” Contemplate a modern-day painter, software engineer, or language teacher, and further one who is disinterested in recreational athleticism – it is quite easy for such a person to be lulled into believing that in order to proceed with their chosen life they need little more from their body than the ability to stand, walk and breathe. Ah, but remember our thought experiment: that’s the same thing as a track star coming to the conclusion that the ability to read is not worth pursuing.

Earlier I wrote “you are more powerful than you know.” Well, if you ignore the body, another truth is that you are also more vulnerable than you know. Yes, yes, most of us no longer have to hunt for our food, run from wild animals and defend our villages from marauders on a seemingly daily basis, but just because we don’t have to regularly use our body in this way, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to activate it when necessary. A neglected body is a walking liability to yourself and to those around you. Could you pull yourself up, just once, to save your own life? Could you defend your child to save theirs? Could you rise from a car accident to help others wounded? Could you run a distance to find help for others when needed? Are your organs healthy enough to remain around for your family? Are you setting an example of embracing a healthy diet and strong body for those that observe you? I mentioned “duty” at the beginning of this entry. Duty indeed.

Beyond duty, there is the growth. Ah, the growth. Take pride in your physicality, and you will rise, fellow Sapiens. Our physical strain, our physical ascent, can reshape so much of how we engage the world, and how we engage ourselves. That act of regular exercise, conscious diet and the pursuit of ever-evolving physical goals is a catalyst, a forcing-function for the development of some of our greatest virtues: discipline, balance, stress-tolerance, perseverance, fortitude, self-respect. Conversely, physical growth is often the agent that extinguishes some of our worst traits: laziness, sloth, apathy, avoidance, self-loathing. All of these traits, those cultivated by and those extinguished by physical growth, can be transposed to all that we do within the non-physical. It is an undeniable circular connection. I’ve come across many intellectually-oriented achievers that view their isolated prowess as a justified excuse to neglect the physical. They are wrong. True and holistic self-respect extends to the body; this is unavoidable. Respect your body, push your body, and you will soon find that many other doors in this life will open.

Duty, growth…how about healing and energy? Science clearly demonstrates the chemical and psychological benefits of physical health. Our mood, our energy, are substantially governed by our physical activity, and by what foods we put inside our body. Embracing repeatable self-healing and energizing processes is critical for a prosperous life. We’re not always “on,” things do not always go our way. Where can one turn to regulate these ups and downs? Many things beyond the physical serve as effective reset-style, self-healing mechanisms, such as being with loved ones, playing music, sharing a conversation. What’s so wonderful about self-healing through physical engagement is that it doesn’t fail, ever. Its reliability is off the charts. At a biological level, it activates the chemicals you need to steady yourself, to rebuild, to reposition, to heal. This gift is there for you, it’s in our nature, do not discard it.

For our body’s journey, it is critical to remember the essence of Sapien Prime, that the truest success is in the active pursuit of our apex potential, not in reaching some unreachable end. Alignment with Sapien Prime is a mindset that seeks simply to evolve over our time. We all have different bodies, different breaks. Do not measure your body by some ultimate species-wide standard; that’s just foolishness. Measure it against yourself, measure against yesterday, measure against tomorrow. Physical health is not a straight line, and the peaks and valleys are plentiful. The idea of being fully optimized at all times – perfect diet, perfect exercise, perfect sleep, perfect movement – is fanciful and precariously unrealistic. Life is a balancing act of priorities, and being in the best physical condition we can be at any moment is almost always shaped by life’s other demands and constraints. I certainly know that my physicality is not “fully optimized” at all times, but I also know that I can keep pushing, keep adjusting, keep progressing, keep rising throughout the ups and downs. Ride the wave, regain your focus, grow over time.

Over my life I’ve deeply enjoyed many types of wide-ranging physical activities outside of gym-based exercises – alpine sports, climbing, mountaineering, martial arts, ice hockey, golf, this list goes on. However, my primary source of physical activity still comes from the daily embrace of the trip to the gym, a constant training mode. Over the decades I’ve refined my workouts, become increasingly creative, experimented with unorthodox approaches, and continually pushed my limits even within a four-wall environment. Across the years I’ve been approached by people in the gym and it’s almost always because they’re coming to ask the same version of the following question: “I have to ask, what are you training for?” They look at me expecting to hear some precise and specialized answer, like an upcoming event for a competitive sport. My usual response takes the following shape, “I am training for nothing, and for everything. I want better control over my body, and I want it to be as strong and healthy as it can be.”

In my works to come, I will cover much more about how I approach the body, physical health, fitness, diet and beyond. I will do what I can to share tools and mindsets that I have found helpful in this regard. Also, in an increasingly AI-driven world where many of our non-physical abilities are being abstracted away from our daily occupation, one might well be wise to reflect on the revealed residual value of our physical capacity. We must continually nurture and take pride in what we can do with our human bodies, as they surely need not be reduced to mere scrolling thumbs. I believe the reservoir of our physicality as humans is one of great abundance, and one that not only advances us as individuals, but can bind us as a community.

Train for nothing, and for everything.