As an English teacher I am by nature concerned with the way we frame words. The way in which we speak matters. For example, during our chapel lesson at my school a few weeks ago, the young man who was speaking made a disconcerting verbal lapse repeatedly: asked to speak on the subject of worshiping (God) with our bodies he made the linguistic error of dropping both the implied direct object (God) and the quite necessary preposition (with). His subject, therefore, became "worshiping our bodies" (caveat lector: in case you have already tuned out, know that the actual content of this post is wildly divergent from a grammar lesson).
While this was a humorous (for those whose level of attention caught the error) and quite, I am assuming, unintentional misspeak the broader lesson holds: the way we frame things matter, the way we say things has consequences. My post title is a play on the oft-heard mantra "mind over matter," which has been used to will countless thousands through seemingly endless windsprints, laps around a track or in a pool, and hideous sets of lifting plates of metal off your chest. The idea, of course, is that our mind (our wills, our grit, our mental toughness) is somehow separate from our matter (our bodies, our capabilities, our physical strength). This idea is prima facie ludicrous. No amount of mind will allow me to run an Olympic-qualifying marathon time or lift a ridiculous piece of metal weighing 300 pounds off my chest. But we repeat it. Grit it out, boys. Rest is for sissies. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Grrrr.
What the opposition of mind to matter obscures is the fact that without substantial matter mere mind is grievously incompetent for some tasks. What it also obscures, and from quite another angle, is that our minds and our bodies are simply not separated from each other in the least. The West, by and large and in innumerable areas of life, still is besieged by a Platonic dualism that separates mind/body, soul/spirit, physical/material. But mind over matter is actually closer to the truth than simple biological determinism. Some people are better competitors than others; some are simply able to will themselves through pain in a way that similarly trained athletes cannot. This much is undeniable. As an athlete who best fits in the Clydesdale category of racers, I have whooped people much fitter than me (from the outside). Likewise, I have had it handed to me by people I could no doubt take to task in a wrestling match. What gives? Why are some people able to double down in effort while redlining and others start walking? Why do we separate mind and body, giving primacy to either one or the other?
It is this basic misunderstanding that Matt Fitzgerald counters in his new work How Bad Do You Want It? Fitzgerald's work could actually smack at first glance as further strengthening of mind over matter drill instructor aphorisms, but Fitzgerald is instead promoting a newer psychobiological school of endurance athleticism. Mind, body joined. Our brain guiding our bodies. Our bodies responding to our conscious mental activity. I started reading the book this evening. It is going to be hard to put down. I want to be better. I want to run faster when I want to run slower. I want to want it more than I want comfort and easy-breathing.
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