In my youth I spent a great deal of time in Yosemite. It was my Fortress of Solitude, my special retreat. I spent days and weeks on end with friends, and alone, backpacking and rock climbing. To spend a couple of weeks solo backpacking with a short food supply sharpened my survival skills and forced me to face a number of inner demons. The experiences taught me about the best and worst of myself and shaped much of my life today.
One particular climb I would return to periodically taught me a most valuable lesson; I call it "Flash or Thrash". Chingando was a short, nasty, vertical, 10a off-width jam-crack, and it never changed. It was a short pitch of solid granite, and a magnet of sorts. It was an exhausting, muscle torturing, skin-abrading, grunt - some days. Those days I recall it being a "Thrash". And then there were the days when everything fell into place. My movements were fluid, nearly graceful, a well choreographed ballet that simply fell into place. In climbing parlance, a "Flash".
So what made one attempt different from another? Was it diet? Training? Weather or temperature? It might have been a combination of those factors, but I believe the difference was inside of me; my mental state.
At that time I had no conscious connection with my Creator, God. But I was aware that my emotions and thought-life could impact on my experience. As a recovering alcoholic and addict I have learned to apply many of my life-lessons to enhance the experience of recovery; and this one, Flash or Thrash, is proving invaluable. If my sobriety is contingent upon maintenance of a fit spiritual condition, I must work to eliminate sources of thrash from my experience.
Mental state, or my thought-life, impacts on the quality of my sobriety, my serenity. And my serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations (find it in the Big Book). Relationships improve with better thought control. But most importantly, my relationship with my Creator, and my brother Jesus, improves when I remember I am called to "...demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2 Cor 10:4-6 NIV)
I absolute love the way this passage reads in The Message, too. "The world is unprincipled. It's dog-eat-dog out there! The world doesn't fight fair. But we don't live or fight our battles that way—never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren't for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity." (2 Cor 10:3-6 TM)
One particular climb I would return to periodically taught me a most valuable lesson; I call it "Flash or Thrash". Chingando was a short, nasty, vertical, 10a off-width jam-crack, and it never changed. It was a short pitch of solid granite, and a magnet of sorts. It was an exhausting, muscle torturing, skin-abrading, grunt - some days. Those days I recall it being a "Thrash". And then there were the days when everything fell into place. My movements were fluid, nearly graceful, a well choreographed ballet that simply fell into place. In climbing parlance, a "Flash".
So what made one attempt different from another? Was it diet? Training? Weather or temperature? It might have been a combination of those factors, but I believe the difference was inside of me; my mental state.
At that time I had no conscious connection with my Creator, God. But I was aware that my emotions and thought-life could impact on my experience. As a recovering alcoholic and addict I have learned to apply many of my life-lessons to enhance the experience of recovery; and this one, Flash or Thrash, is proving invaluable. If my sobriety is contingent upon maintenance of a fit spiritual condition, I must work to eliminate sources of thrash from my experience.
Mental state, or my thought-life, impacts on the quality of my sobriety, my serenity. And my serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations (find it in the Big Book). Relationships improve with better thought control. But most importantly, my relationship with my Creator, and my brother Jesus, improves when I remember I am called to "...demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2 Cor 10:4-6 NIV)
I absolute love the way this passage reads in The Message, too. "The world is unprincipled. It's dog-eat-dog out there! The world doesn't fight fair. But we don't live or fight our battles that way—never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren't for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity." (2 Cor 10:3-6 TM)
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