The Hardest Task Of Life

Working Out, Working In: Applying the Six Principles of Athletic Training to Writing and Creative Work

Brain Pickings / by Maria Popova / December 17, 2023 at 02:48PM

The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves — to continually purify and clarify who and what we are, shedding the shoulds of culture, convention, and expectation to discover the innermost musts: those deepest and truest callings of the authentic self, or what we might call soul. And yet the great paradox is that the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote, for she understood that the finest souls “are always the supplest.”

[source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/12/17/exercise-writing/]

Drawing an analogy between the science of exercise and his [Bill Hayes] own art — writing — he considers the six principles that sustain long-term personal fitness. And of course you need to go to the link to read them, as you should.