Give yourself room to breathe.
Being driven and ambitious is not inherently a bad thing.
It is far better than being lazy and apathetic.
However, you need room to breathe.
You need time to relax, to decompress, and to recharge.
Do not make yourself so busy that you cannot enjoy yourself or the fruits of your labor.
Do not forget to breathe.
You can outwork everyone around you, but without sufficient rest and recovery, your success may be short-lived.
There is no success without hard work and in order to have more than you do today, you must do more than you did yesterday.
However, your ability to sustain your output of effort and to enjoy the fruits of your labor is largely determined by the quality of your rest and recovery.
You can push your body and mind as hard as you want to, but be aware that you can only do this for so long before they shut down or break to demand that you rest.
Recovery from this will most likely set your progress back much more than if you moved a little slower and pushed a little less hard to allow for rest and recovery in your schedule.
Success without longevity and sustainability, after all, can hardly be considered success.
Simply because we get used to something does not mean it is good for us.
Humans are amazingly resilient and adaptable creatures with a great capacity to work through stress and pain as long as we feel like we are making progress because of it. This survival mechanism can be extremely useful when we need it for some specific task, but, like every tool at our disposal, it is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all solution for every aspect of our lives. Simply put, we are not meant to push though every difficult, stressful, and painful thing we experience just because we can.
Stress and pain are our mind and body’s way of telling us something is not right, of telling us to slow down or not to do something. They are indicators that what we trying to do, if we do it in this way for a long enough period of time, could cause us injury or even death. Undertaken for good reason, under the right conditions, and with proper precautions, however, working through stress and pain can actually make us stronger, healthier, and more resilient, but only so long as these periods of work are bookended by a proper amount physical and mental rest, recovery, and nutrition.
Without reprieve, stress and pain over long durations actually make us weaker, more fragile, and vulnerable. While we may come to not notice it, if we experience the same stresses and the same pains constantly, day in and day out, we put ourselves in a position to be blindsided by other physical, psychological, and emotional dangers because we have become unhealthily desensitized to their warning signs. It is actually in the space between, in the periods of physical and mental rest, recovery, and nourishment, that we heal and grow.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.
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