Stuckness

Over 30 years ago I read Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a ‘non-fiction novel’ about a cross country motorcycle ride of a father with his young son. I cannot recall much about the book except for one concept, which has stayed with me ever since, the concept of “stuckness”. Persig can describe this better than I can.

"...stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies the physical stuckness of whatever it is that you are working on. A screw sticks, for example, on the side cover assembly (of a motorcycle). You check the owner's manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is 'Remove side cover plate' in that wonderful, terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There's no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.

If you're experienced you'd probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. If you're inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screw driver and really twist it hard, a procedure you've had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.

Your mind was already was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle."

In the example above, even though you are already thinking ahead to what you want to accomplish, the little, minor thing- a stuck screw- is now a major thing, preventing you from doing what you want to do, what you know you need to do. I believe we all get “stuck” at times in life. Some people live in a perpetual state of “stuckness”, knowing what they need to do, even wanting to do it, but unable because of some small thing that assumes major significance.

For me, “stuckness” is mental and is induced by a combination of three things, my three “D’s” if you will: distractedness, disorganization, and lack of discipline. Each of these alone I could probably manage but the combination is downright near impossible to overcome. This is where the cold showers and the road to the ironman come in. The former serve to focus me and the latter will require organization and discipline in equal measure. I only hope and pray that I can carry this over to other areas of my life.

Stuckness can be anything in your life that prevents you from reaching your potential, or even just being someday better than you are now. Getting unstuck doesn’t necessarily require cold showers or doing an ironman. It does require taking a first step toward your dream or goal. That step leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on. At least that’s the way I believe it works.

This week’s training summary (I was traveling and caught a cold, so I didn’t push it- there will be plenty of time for that):

Swam- none

Biked- 34 mi @ average 16.8 mph

Ran- 5.57 mi @ 9:40/mi pace