TRANSCRIPT
I cannot remember the last time that I had my camera outside and I was videoing myself. It’s been years—six years, seven years, eight years, something like that. Well, the reason that I’m shooting video outside now, with cicadas in the background, and the subject matter of this video are overlapping.
What I’d like to talk about today is the subject of flexibility training. It’s a personal phrase of my own, and when I talk about flexibility training, what I mean is something that I consciously, at some level, put myself in a position to do or allow myself to roll with the flow of. And what it means is allowing myself to live outside of my comfort zone. Or if I am already outside of my comfort zone, to just roll with it, to be with it, to hang with it, to not fight it, to not fight to put myself immediately back into my comfort zone. But if anything, to try to appreciate the value in being outside of my comfort zone. The purpose being so that I become more flexible. It’s training and becoming more flexible in life. I’m talking about on that inner emotional level, even intellectual level perhaps, but really what I’m focusing is the emotional side of becoming more flexible in life.
The first time I ever read something that really acknowledged the value in being flexible was the first time I read the Dao De Jing over 25 years ago. Lao Tzu’s book of philosophy, even of religion, the basis of Taoism, where he said when you look at trees and the wind blows really, really hard, the young trees, they’re flexible and they bend with the wind. But the old trees, they’ve lost their flexibility. The sap is no longer flowing so freely through them. The bark has become thick, and when the wind blows hard, they don’t bend. Maybe they bend a little, but if they bend too much, they break and they fall down. And I remember reading that, thinking of that as a metaphor, which is what I believe he intended—a metaphor for ourselves.
For me, myself, at that point, the first time I read that, I was actually in China, living way, way out of my comfort zone back in 1994 when I was 22. It was incredibly stressful, and in a way, I didn’t like the stress. In a way, I think at some level nobody really likes stress. And yet, in another way, I loved the stress because I realized it was helping me to grow, grow in different ways, see different sides of myself. Living in my comfort zone, although it was comfortable, although I enjoyed it, although so many of my fellows, my peers, were living solely to become more comfortable and more comfortable, I was finding that being comfortable was killing me.
If I’d followed the rules of my family system, if I’d stayed much closer to my family system, if I just turned around and replicated my family system, found a girlfriend, found a wife, a normal girlfriend, a normal wife, had normal kids, gotten a normal job, I think it would have killed me emotionally. There was something about it that just didn’t work for me, especially since the comfort zone of my childhood family system actually, on a deeper emotional level, wasn’t really comfortable. It wasn’t preparation for the wild life that I really needed and I really wanted. And so, in my own way, I started exploring. I started experimenting, and it wasn’t easy.
I remember many, many nights of my travels in my early 20s, certainly hitchhiking a lot, ending up sleeping outside because I couldn’t get a ride at night or I got dropped off too late, couldn’t find a place to sleep, not being able to put my tent up because it didn’t feel safe, listening to all the wild animal noises, sometimes even sleeping close to people’s houses, maybe in a forest right behind their house. I could hear people talking sometimes—scary. But a big part of my flexibility training, and I didn’t quite know it then as consciously, then I thought I’m accruing experience in life. But what I realized over time is this is making me really flexible, really giving me the capacity to realize, you know, I can think in different ways. I can sleep in all sorts of different environments.
I remember over the last few years spending a lot of nights sleeping in airports and realizing so many people cannot sleep in airports. Me, I just lie down on the floor in a corner somewhere. Sometimes I tie a little bit of fishing line to my arm and to my backpack and to my guitar so that if somebody tries to take it—and it’s happened before—or somebody tries to steal my stuff, they don’t see the fishing line and it pulls on my arm and then they’re like, “Oh, sorry, sorry.” Also, eating all sorts of different types of food. I eat pretty much basically everything now. When I’m alone, living with myself, I tend to eat much more of a plant-based diet. When I’m out in the world traveling, living in lots and lots and lots of people’s homes, just as part of my flexibility training, to be able to adjust to people’s worlds, to be flexible enough to live in their world, to see life through their eyes, pretty much I eat everything. And that is part of my flexibility training.
But to bring it back to this video right now, why I’m here filming outside is I’m living with people now who I don’t know so well. And this morning, because I prefer to shoot my video in the morning, to make these videos in the morning when my brain is at its best, well, the house is busy. I couldn’t film. It’s too noisy in there. So I decided, you know, go give it a shot. What a perfect thing to do—to do a video on flexibility training outside in a strange and unusual environment.
But then when I think of flexibility training, one thing that really comes to my mind is learning new languages, living in new languages, having my human interactions, my relationships that I have with people in new languages. I’ve been doing a lot of that for the last 10 years, putting a lot of effort into learning new languages, making my mind be flexible. It’s stressful to learn a new language. It isn’t easy. It’s not easy to express myself in a new way. It’s not easy for anyone to do that from what I’ve seen. But it gets easier over time. And what happens as the result of being successful at learning how to do that is it really makes me proud of myself. It’s like I gained a skill, I gained strength, I gained flexibility to be able to live in a very different way, also to live in different cultures with people who think differently, who behave differently, who have different rules.
It requires a lot of learning on my part. It requires a lot of me putting aside my preferential way of doing things and trying things in a new way, to look at things through another perspective, through their eyes, to be able to adjust to their world. Now, there are people who also are more flexible than others who can adjust to my world. But a lot of times I find, especially if I’m traveling into their home, their culture, their language, their world, to the degree that I can, I want to adjust as much as I can for myself—yes, for them, but also for myself to learn to grow.
Now, the other thing to get back to Laozi’s quote about the young tree having sap in it so it can be the most flexible in the wind, another thing I see with flexibility training, a result, a consequence I’ve seen now after doing it for decades, is that I stay younger. I’m almost 50 years old now, and I feel in some ways when I look at most of my fellows who I’ve known for a long time—decades, college friends of mine, high school friends of mine, childhood, early childhood friends of mine—most seem like they got a lot older a lot more quickly. And strangely, I think that can be a consequence of not being so flexible, being more rigid. In a way, I think sometimes when people pad themselves into a bubble of comfort, even though they feel better, they can get old more quickly.
And I think part of the reason that people get old more quickly when they live in more comfort is that comfort is an illusion in a lot of ways. A lot of times people think they’re living in comfort, but there actually…
Isn’t as much comfort as we’d like to believe. Because what happens is people who live in the most comfort of all, often the most pleasure, the most happiness, when some little thing, maybe little to me or little to someone who’s practiced a lot of flexibility training, when something little happens, it is huge to them. And it can really throw them off and break them.
A story from a couple of decades ago in my life that I heard that really affected me about flexibility training is there was a guy in my high school. He was a couple years older than me. He was basically a nice guy, but very good looking, a very good athlete, and very, very popular. He got all the girls, as it were. He was a lot of what, oh, I wish I could have been. I was kind of a geek, kind of an outcast socially. I hadn’t figured a lot of things out. I was more in my own private world. Well, he was more out there. He was successful, popular, beloved in the school. He got his name put on the announcements a lot. A lot of guys would have loved to be him. A lot of girls wanted to date him.
Well, what happened is, I heard this, didn’t see it myself, but this is what I heard really jumped out at me. A couple of years after high school, still a successful guy, he was working, doing some woodwork, some carpentry, and he had an accident. A couple of his fingers were cut off. And okay, that’s a trauma for anyone. That’s a horrible thing. Nobody wants that to happen. But I’ve met a lot of people in my decades of life, especially out in poorer countries of the world, who are missing fingers. Yes, in America I meet people like that, but a lot more in other parts of the world, in developing countries where they don’t get their fingers sewed back on.
Well, apparently he could not get his fingers sewn back on, and he became severely depressed. It threw him off. And what I interpreted is he was someone who had never had to face that kind of adversity in his life. And it was extreme. And he’d been so used to living in a way, a comfort, a comfortable life in a bubble, padded, where everything went his way again and again and again. He was like the ultimate success. When he was dealt a blow by the fates of life, it really threw him off, and he sunk into a severe depression and ended up killing himself. That’s what I heard. And I remember the pain that that caused me. It was like so sad, but also the thoughts that I had. And in a way, it backed up my philosophy for myself that I wanted to be more flexible in life.
I wanted to be in a position where some accident happened, and it could have happened, and it still can happen, that my fingers were cut off, that I would have the internal flexibility, the strength inside myself through life experience of rejection, failure. I’ve had a lot of failure, a lot of rejection, that it would make me strong enough to be able to say, you know, I’m going on. I love myself enough, and I’m going to be okay.
Well, he’s just one example that I’ve seen of becoming rigid as the result of living with too much success and too much comfort. For me, a big part of my flexibility training is experimenting in life. And a big part of experimenting for anybody who does real experiments, scientists, real scientists, not the fake scientists nowadays, who their experiments come up with the results that they want them to come up with again and again because they want to make money, they want to publish, they want to succeed. But the kind of experiments I’m talking about are the real life experiments where you try things and you don’t know what the answer will be, and you’re testing. And a big part of that is to fail. And to fail is to know pain, is to know stress, is to actually have to take a step back and look in the mirror and say, what happened in this experiment? Why did it fail? And what can I learn?
And as the result of learning from failures is to gain experience, to grow, and to become someone who can take better experiments, smarter experiments. And ultimately, for what I see in my life, someone who gains wisdom, knowledge about myself, about life, about my personality. Now, can I become more flexible as I grow older? I surely hope to. Because another thing that I see, I’ve seen it with some of my relatives, especially my grandparents, all of my grandparents in fact, is they became so rigid. They got themselves really backed into a corner. Both of my grandfathers ended up with dementia. I think dementia sometimes is an extreme form of becoming inflexible, of becoming so rigid in one’s life emotionally, not just physically, not just in the brain, but emotionally, that people just end up blocking out everything that doesn’t go exactly their way.
And I saw that with my grandfathers. I saw that with both of my grandmothers becoming so rigid as they got older that in a way they couldn’t function in the world. They couldn’t relate to me. They couldn’t relate to life. They couldn’t relate to each other in a lot of ways. They couldn’t relate to themselves. And it was not a way that I wanted to grow older. I see it with my parents too, becoming more and more and more rigid. Lots of old people.
So for me, the prescription I have for myself is to try to the degree that I can, sometimes to the degree that life throws at me, to live outside of my comfort zone, to be willing to take risks, intelligent risks based on my experience that allow me to grow more, become more myself, know myself better, and to know the world better so that I can function better in the world, this modern, difficult, crazy world that seems to be coming more difficult and more crazy. So that I don’t end up under the wheels of life, so that I can stay ahead of life, so that I can keep evolving and hopefully keep being useful to other people.