Journey to Kona Day 11: Envisioning

My wife woke up today pondering the concept of envisioning.  We all spend too much time envisioning our futures.  They are packed with expectations of what is going to happen.  The same view bleeds into our past as we reflect on what could have been.  We can no more change our past than we can predict our future.  We can only really deal with the present.  Life once again imitates ironman, where these concepts are critical for survival.  We spend too much of our lives worrying.  I’m pretty sure that worrying is unhealthy.  Fight or flight is one thing.  When we have an emergent situation, we need the surge of adrenalin to deal with the circumstance.  But when these same hormones are released constantly due to worrying, they cannot be helpful or healthy.  

There is no value in putting pressure on ourselves to achieve specific goals.  The key is to apply the effort and to try.  That’s all that we can ever do.  Results come one way or another.  Expectations really don’t help.  The very term, expectation, provides the clue.  If we spend our time in expectation, it detracts us from the effort and energy needed to focus on actually accomplishing something.  One of the things that I’ve learned over the years doing ironman is that spending time worrying or questioning my decisions during a race will actually sap me of needed energy.  The most important thing one can do during an ironman is to conserve all the energy you can.  It starts in the morning of a race.  Spending time worrying about the race, allowing oneself to get too cold in transition, spending too much time on ones feet, all of these things use energy that will be needed during the very long day.

Life is no different.  We need to conserve our energy, and not waste it on needless and unnecessary energy expenditures.  That includes worrying, overthinking (my number one weakness), and envisioning.  There’s a difference between envisioning and visualizing.  Visualization is a tool that I have found to be very effective in triathlon, but also in life.  Practicing what we’re going to do allows us to prepare neural pathways so that they can be more effectively utilized.  Visualization is purposeful. Envisioning is not.  Envisioning is about hoping how things will work out, when in fact, we just don’t know.  We’re better off just focusing on being in the moment. It’s really the only time that matters.