mrpink essays

Strong, but Soft

From the inside, determination and stubbornness feel exactly the same. Both are the same absence of doubt.

At a retreat, some years ago now, the teacher told us about a conversation he'd had with his own teacher in Thailand. Out of it came a line that still hasn't let go of me: you can't meditate while you smoke, but you can smoke while you meditate.

The line isn't about tobacco. It's about hierarchy. About what sits in front and what sits behind. About which is the main activity and which is the accompaniment. The same pair of actions, exactly the same ones, changes its nature entirely depending on which of the two occupies the center of attention.

I've been turning this over on the treadmill.

The inversion

I've always run with music on. For years that meant one thing: running was the task, and music was what made it bearable. An anesthetic. Something I put in front of my attention precisely so I wouldn't be fully present in what I was doing.

A while back I inverted the order. Now I listen to music, and in the background, I run.

It isn't wordplay. It's a real shift in where attention sits. While I run, what I do is follow the details: a bass line I'd never registered, the way a track climbs in intensity without your noticing, backing vocals that were there all along. The music is the object. The running happens on its own, behind it.

This has two conditions, and it's worth being honest about them. The first is technical: you need enough of a base for the running to stay on automatic. The second is about intensity: the effort can't be too high, because a body pushed to its limit demands your whole attention and leaves nothing over for the bass or the backing vocals.

This has a beautiful consequence: time stops being a mystery. Time is that step-by-step calculation. There is no "Platonic" time floating separately — there is a universe iterating. Each moment is the execution of the next computational step, and so the next moment only exists when it is computed. The arrow of time, then, is not something the universe has. It's something the universe does.

Put another way: this doesn't work if you're suffering.

Determination isn't gritting your teeth

Here is the part that actually interests me, and it runs against intuition.

When we think about determination, nearly all of us picture the same thing: the clenched jaw, the face of endurance, will as a form of violence against yourself. Determination as hardness.

What I keep finding is the opposite. Determination, properly understood, doesn't harden. It softens. It's what lets you relax inside the effort, because it takes off the table the only question that genuinely tires you out.

An album, not a clock

Before I get on the treadmill I decide how many songs I'm going to run.

You can do it in minutes, of course, but thinking in time pushes you toward the traditional way of seeing exercise: the treadmill as something to get through, the clock as the enemy you keep glancing at. I prefer to measure it the way I measured it before, back when there were no treadmills and no clocks involved.

I came of age in the nineties. I remember the ritual precisely: buying a new album, a CD, getting home, dropping onto the bed or straight onto the floor, and listening to it end to end. Start to finish. No skipping tracks. I lost that practice at some point, the way I think nearly all of us lost it, and I got it back without looking for it, sideways, through exercise.

So you get on and you say: I'm going to listen to this album.

And that's where the important part begins. At no point is it in question whether you'll finish it. Whether you're tired. Whether you don't feel like it today. Your mind leaves no room for those questions, not because it represses them, but because they were already answered before you got on.

Pace and duration depend on the person and are completely irrelevant to what I'm describing. Someone might not manage more than four miles an hour for ten minutes. Someone else can hold seven and a half for an hour. It makes no difference at all. The only thing that matters is that the effort not be too demanding, because that is what the flow depends on. With time, and without rushing, that level can only go up.

The two legs

Determination needs two moments, and they have to be kept apart.

The first is about rigor. Before you get on, you choose, and that choice demands a self-knowledge that isn't trivial: knowing which album I actually want to hear, and knowing I can hold that pace for that long. Not what I'd like to be able to do. Not what I could do five years ago. That moment allows doubt, revision, uncomfortable honesty.

The second is about silence. Once you're on, the question closes.

What works is the sequence, not either piece on its own. And it almost always breaks on the same side: it isn't that you choose badly, it's that you don't choose, and then use the absence of doubt as an alibi.

That isn't determination anymore. It's setting an arbitrary target and then forcing yourself toward it on willpower. The tension doesn't come only from the effort, but from never having asked whether that was the album you wanted to hear.

Back to the body

Every so often I move my attention from the music to the running, and run a check.

In my case certain things repeat. Sometimes my right foot drifts outward. Sometimes I'm not driving my knees forward with the right intention. Sometimes my chest isn't as upright as it should be. I check, I correct, and I go back to the music.

But the most important check isn't the technical one.

It's about tension. That the face is relaxed. That the shoulders aren't riding up. That there's no rigidity in the arms. Sometimes it helps to let a slight smile appear, though strictly speaking, if you're doing things right, that smile should show up on its own. When it shows up on its own, it's the best sign that everything is where it should be.

With practice you reach surprisingly deep levels of relaxation. You discover you can find pleasure, and not only satisfaction afterward, inside a demanding task. While the demand is happening.

Strong, but soft

Years ago I took kung fu classes with a Chinese teacher, trained in China. He said things that sounded like riddles at the time and that I came to understand little by little, over the years.

One of them was that the strike has to be strong, but soft.

That's the whole thing. Exerting effort doesn't oblige you to exert it in a hard, rigid, clenched way. It can be done gently. With elegance. Even with enjoyment. Strength and tension are different things, though we learned them together and struggle to picture them apart.

That, I think, is the lesson that matters. You can demand a great deal of yourself physically and mentally, sustain real effort for a real stretch of time, and do it in a way that lets you enjoy it.

Tension is not evidence of effort

There's a difference between doing something hard and doing it the hard way, and we confuse them almost every time.

Running forty-five minutes is hard. Running them in suffering doesn't make them worthier, or more effective, or more real. But something in us reads the clenching as proof that the thing is really happening, and reads relaxation as a suspicion that we're cheating.

It isn't about enduring. It's about sustaining effort in a relaxed way, which is a different skill and one that, unlike endurance, can be trained.

Something stays open, and I don't have a good answer for it.

When that belief loosensAll of this depends on having chosen well before getting on. But from the inside, while you're running, determination and stubbornness feel exactly the same. Both are the same absence of doubt. The difference isn't in the experience, it's in a decision already behind you, one you committed to not revisiting. — not as intellectual pose but as genuine recognition — decisions keep happening, leadership keeps being exercised, things keep moving forward. But there's less internal friction around all of it.

And if halfway through the effort I discover I chose the wrong album? Part of me says you finish it. Another says that if I already know I got it wrong, there's no merit in continuing.

A good part of the answer is scale. An album runs forty-five minutes, and at that scale the rule works fine: finish it, the cost of having chosen wrong is an hour of your life. But there are commitments that last five years, and applying the same rule — the question closes, it doesn't get revisited — is exactly the mechanism by which someone stays inside something that already died.

Where that line sits, I don't know. And I suspect you find out which side you landed on quite a while later.

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