Week 47: The Big Picture and The Little Picture

This Week’s Accountability Report

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Exercise:

Six out of Seven days

Weight:

74.4 kg

The Big Picture and The Little Picture

Recently, I listened to an interview with Ross Edgley, a man who, earlier this month, completed a swim around the entire island of Great Britain. Let that sink in for a second.

Swimming with the tides for 157 days, Ross swam for six hours at a time, twelve hours a day. That blows my mind. I can’t even imagine floating in a pool with an inner tube for six hours while watching three of my favorite movies in a row let alone swimming for six hours straight. Even more mind blowing to me is that before he embarked on this massive swim, he spent forty-eight hours swimming laps in a pool for what amounted to the equivalent of about 140 km. This kind of extreme endurance training is fascinating to me. I can’t imagine ever doing it myself, but at the same time, I find it reassuring. It reminds me that I can most likely do much more than I think I’m capable of.

While listening to Ross talk, I was struck by two stories that he told, both of which hold a degree of accomplishment and a degree of failure. In the first story, he talks about embarking on a forty-mile open sea swim while towing a one hundred pound tree through the water behind him. In his mind, he had expected to arrive in Martinique a few hours after his departure to big fan fare. He had envisioned himself meeting his mother on the shore and being able to share his accomplishment with her on her birthday. Instead, finding himself battered by high waves and troublesome tides, he had to turn back mid swim. Before arriving at his starting point, Ross spent over thirty hours swimming in the open sea and covered a distance of roughly 100 km. Despite not reaching his goal, athletes and trainers praised him for what was an incredible athletic feat. Nevertheless, Ross couldn’t shake the feeling of failure.

When recounting his experience of swimming around Great Britain. Ross stated that his original intention was to complete the swim in 100 days (57 fewer days than he actually needed). While stating that he thinks he could have completed the swim in the timeframe that he had originally set for himself, something changed along the way and the swim become more of an adventure. In a sense, this massive swim evolved into being just a single piece in the puzzle of not only Ross’s life, but the lives of the crewmembers who were working with him as well.

In that way, the rigidity of the 100 day benchmark faded and the swim became more about completing the most tantamount obstacles as they came in a way that would allow everyone involved to both keep their obligations to their families back home and complete their ultimate goal, which was to see that Ross swam one giant lap around the entirety of Great Britain.

What does this have to do with the big picture and the little picture, and how does it relate to me?

Well, I think that both of Ross’s stories show that sometimes the big picture and the little picture change places, and that’s okay. Sometimes personal goals seem like the big picture. They consume our energy and our attention, and if we aren’t careful, they begin to dwarf the other relationships and obligations that we have in our life. If we are lucky, though, we can find a way to incorporate our personal goals into what ultimately is the greater picture, our daily lives and the lives of those around us.

In another sense, while end goals often seem like the big picture, the journey that gets us to those final goals, and the small things that we accomplish along the way, which could be thought of the small picture(s), in hindsight, often become the true big picture.

For me, looking back over the past year, I see that while my focus has been on losing 10 kg, what I have really accomplished is something so much bigger than just losing weight. I have created sustainable fitness habits that have led to not only weight loss, but a thorough transformation of my body, increased energy, strength, and stamina, a smaller waist, lower blood pressure, and a number of other things. Not only that, but I’ve been able to accomplish all of these things without putting undo burden on my family or the people around me. In that sense, whether I reach my goal of losing 10 kg by January 4 or not, I am very happy with what I already achieved over this past year.

Now, as we begin approaching the new year, I am beginning to think of how I want to maintain the new levels of fitness that I have reached, and what I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. As for maintaining health and fitness, my interest is beginning to move toward Movement Culture, something that I am only just beginning to learn about.

As for personal goals, well, I want to work on creating a life purpose statement for myself and begin slowly reshaping my life so that everything I do moves me in the direction of that purpose. At the moment, I have no idea how to do this, and to be honest, I feel a little overwhelmed by the idea of it, but I’ve heard many people talk about the importance of doing so and I think it sounds like something that would be very rewarding and fulfilling to do.

How about you?

Do you have any ideas about what you want to accomplish in the upcoming year?