Life – Page 45 – My Outdoor Living Room

I think I’m getting old. The tell-tale signs are there. I won’t go into detail on all of them, but I think it’s healthy to admit it. One of the reasons I have for thinking this is that I seem to be fighting a lot nowadays. I don’t mean going down the pub and smashing a bottle over somebody’s head. Those days are well behind me. Luckily, last time, the victim didn’t press charges anyway, so I was quite fortunate. She was my mother-in-law after all. Anyway, I digress. By fighting, I mean standing up for things. People with flash LinkedIn profiles probably call this passionate, if at all they know what passionate means. I’ve discussed my job before here, and I think the main reason I hate it and seemingly suffer there is because I try to do my job right, and thoroughly, and I seem to be the only one. Everyone else has a wonderful day scraping by on the bare minimum required so they don’t get sacked. Whilst this mentality causes me to suffer at work, it does give me the strength and determination in other areas of my life to fight for something I feel is right, and is more likely to be a worthwhile cause, unlike my job which is feeding fat cats so they can get even fatter and do ridiculously unethical things with their money.

The point I’m getting to is as I’m aging, I’m realising that you suffer the most for things you fight for the most. Love Island would bore the living crap out of me, so I don’t watch it, but this same piece of asinine “entertainment” (can you tell I don’t like it?) could be the cornerstone of somebody else’s life. They could be involved in brawls over it. It bothers them, so they suffer for it. Football supporters are the same. Manchester United fans don’t give a rodent’s rear end about how Bristol City are getting on and vice versa but they will fight tooth and nail with City and Rovers fans all the same.

What is important to me are things like the environment, conservation, my own health and wellbeing and the health and wellbeing of my family and closest friends. I will stand up and fight for those when needed. I hate to forget my principles. I don’t feel they’re shallow and they are for the greater good.

I also believe that every little step in the right direction, no matter how small, is worth it. I’ve talked before about litterpicking and plastic pollution. Very small efforts everyday to fight these is still better than giving up. I sign petitions even though the odds are stacked ridiculously against the petitioners winning. I guess it’s called integrity.

Fighting is good, as long as it’s for the greater good. That definition is still too ambiguous to me however but it’s the closest I can get to a definitive one. Most of the problems we have in the world today are conceived from people fighting for the greater good until they work out their visions of the greater good are different. Then they fight each other.

My 18 year old self would look at me now and call me a miserable old git. I look at my 18 year old self and ask him why he didn’t fight enough for real things. That’s maturing though. I probably fall into the grumpy category. I struggle to recognise much today that I deem real enough to form an opinion on. The environment and self development are two big factors for me, and they go hand in hand. The environment and the state we leave it in will be our legacy in centuries time. It is a selfish act to harm our planet knowingly, saying “It’s not my problem because I won’t be around in a hundred years”.

If you’ve read this far, I think it’s worth mentioning that despite all of this, I do actually enjoy Christmas.

One life – live it. Four simple words. Clichéd perhaps? Over-used perhaps?

The first time I saw this as a slogan was as a sticker on a Land Rover. Since then, I’ve seen it hundreds of times as stickers on Land Rovers. Does this mean that in order to live this one life to the full, you need to be behind the wheel of a Land Rover? I think not. I get that Land Rover drivers might go off-roading, therefore getting their kicks, however, most of the ones I’ve seen carrying these stickers are in immaculate showroom condition. The nearest they’ve been to off-road was when they had two wheels on the pavement outside the post office for five minutes.

I imagine it could be a status symbol, or a way of generating envy. I get it when I’m crawling home after work in very slow traffic, and in the ever-so-slightly quicker moving lane there is a camper van with a surfboard strapped to the roof. It’s a symbol to me that says, wow, they’re living their life. In reality, they might not be able to surf, or even, underneath the cover, it could be an ironing board. One life – iron.

Perception vs reality can be a venomous trap. Judging people’s lives and means. What they choose to show you is only the tip of the iceberg. Smoke and mirrors. That’s a big mistake. An even bigger mistake is to take that perception and let it make you feel sh*t about your own life.

On Sunday I competed in a trail run half marathon. On any day it is tough enough, but this year, in 29 degree heat, it was nearly impossible. The field was strung out, and I overtook many runners and in turn was overtaken myself. The instinct to fight back, latch onto their heels and keep with them kicks in, yet you realise you haven’t got much left in the tank and a with few miles to go the mere promise of finishing isn’t guaranteed, so I find I have to carry on as I’m going and just run my own race. Adjusting my gameplan and tactics from comparing myself to another runner is ludicrous. Those runners are probably fitter, or train harder than me. Hitching on to someone faster and fitter is only going to end one way – in a big fat DNF.

Incidentally, in another trail run I was running a few weeks ago, I ran for a stretch with a guy who had an Ironman tattoo on his leg. I see these tattoos a lot. At every event more or less and to me it means they are fit triathletes who have completed a World Triathlon event, as the tattoo bears the event’s logo. I think to myself that these guys and girls are serious, the ultimate endurance athletes and are forces to be reckoned with. At this said event, for the first time, I directly asked the guy a question about the tattoo, and I posed it to him that this event would be easy, given his World Series Triathlon pedigree, to which he responded, “Oh that? I did a sprint (short distance) triathlon last year, I haven’t done a full distance one. I didn’t finish either, I ran out of juice on the final leg”. I was somewhat amused as I’ve been a fool all these years, measuring myself against people, when not all of them are completely truthful. I did appreciate his honesty however.

Like I said, run your own race. What you measure yourself against could be smoke and mirrors. People will show you only what they want you to see, in all aspects of life. That bumper sticker should say One life – yours. Live it – your way.