Yesterday, I was at knee rehab, bouncing on a trampoline, and… I pulled my calf. A critic would shout, “See, you’d be better off lying on the couch at home!”
The critic’s logic seems flawless. Sure, if I hadn’t jumped on that trampoline, my calf would be fine. And without jiu-jitsu, I wouldn’t have torn my knee ligament. Action means injury, right?
The flaw in this logic is that total rest equals safety.
So why is there always a line of “normal” folks outside the orthopedist’s office? Folks you’d never suspect of lifting anything heavier than a laptop or a grocery bag. A man slips a little on the street, and boom—torn ACL. Or sometimes he just gets out of bed in the morning like always, and wham! His neck locks up.
“Why? I’m not Conor McGregor or David Goggins!” the lover of rest asks, and it’s a fair question. The answer is simple—entropy. It destroys everything, bit by bit. Iron rusts. A fallen apple rots. Muscles atrophy when you rest too much.
You can sit in a chair or run a super-marathon—either way, you’ll suffer from sickness and injuries, just different kinds. Immobility is as destructive as activity.
“Suffering exists,” Buddha’s first noble truth says. The second truth points to the cause—suffering comes from within us. It’s our excess craving for things. The third truth shows the goal: kill the excess, and you kill the suffering.
The fourth noble truth says that liberation comes through the Middle Path, which lies between extremes:
hedonism and asceticism,
matter and spirit,
action and stillness.
Since you and I are just humans, far from Buddha, we’ll keep getting pulled to one side or the other. This means injuries will come regardless. It’s time to return to the center, the “in-between.”
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
About me:
As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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