Philosophy Phriday - Life, One Mile at a Time
Post 4 – Being Present w/ Beau Miles
Beau Miles is what I consider to be a modern philosopher. The way he tells stories and how he looks at the world around him resonates with me. When I watch his videos, I find myself asking a lot of questions of myself. This post is an exploration of those questions and how a video about running a marathon over 24 hours provides some answers, some clarity, and more questions.
“There’s kind of no point, but there’s lots of point”
During the introductory voice-over, Beau tries to explain the point of this marathon exercise. I understand from the format of a YouTube video where people’s viewing time is being invested into the story. There is an irony built into this video where the creator feels the need to justify the time people are going to spend watching this video but the creator doesn’t need a point to create this content. I watch Beau create his list of tasks and check them off over the course of time and distance and I struggle with how to translate the tasks that go with a farm while I live a suburban office worker life on the other side of the globe. I don’t need the translation immediately, I do need to be mindful that the lessons being taught here are universal but need more thought and introspection in order to fit my lifestyle.
On the grander stage, isn’t this the motto of life? The simultaneous awareness of doing things that have importance, but ultimately aren’t that important. This takes the meaning away from the task itself and places meaning in the impact of that task. I think the lesson here is to not take things so seriously. Along the way, we have success and failure. The collective story we tell with our time is more important than any singular task. We must weigh the importance of one task against the larger story we are telling ourselves. I also think we need to be mindful and not let the tasks we add to our lives be the thing that controls our lives. I say that thinking about all the things we bolt on to our lives as the years pass. No one teaches us how to value the future costs or benefits of the things we take on. This is an important lesson I take away from this video. Fill your life with the tasks you can fit into your day and be okay with tasks that can be pushed to the next day. When the tasks come with more cost than benefit, there are questions that need to be asked.
Planting Trees & Momentum
At first glance, being kind assumes that kindness is something being shared between two individuals. This assumption will get you a long way in life, however, being kind to yourself and your surroundings is just as important. I take this lesson in the form of planting trees. On each lap of this marathon, a tree is planted. On the small scale, Beau is being kind to his neighborhood, his small slice of the planet. He is being kind to himself for the shade these trees will provide when he runs future laps around his block. He is being kind to his children who will watch these trees grow over the course of their youth and might one day climb these trees.
This isn’t the only possible interpretation of the benefits of planting trees. Good environmental stewardship, property value maintenance, or future firewood are all possible motivations for planting these trees. The important lesson is to take the positive story Beau is trying to and draw the conclusions that can help you in your life. Kindness was mine, what is yours?
After the first few laps, there is an excitement built by the ideas thought of along the way. That excitement leads to a momentum built that doesn’t have time to pause for the camera. The ideas must be written down so they become more than thought. They are now real and they are something that can be checked off….accomplished. I see this and I see an idealized situation where Beau is in a flow while performing at a high physical level. People should be realistic when they see this. We are not all able to be up for 24 hours. We are not all able to run a marathon in that 24 hours and how many of us have a pile of lumber lying around to build a table? The translation is to think about our baseline and build on what we can accomplish in a period of time that makes sense. I think about my own writing projects and how I’m trying to build up the muscles to work on book, blog, and podcast projects all at the same time. I know what I can manage today. I need to find the excitement that allows me to grow my creative ability and fit that creativity in whatever time I have available.
Building a table
Beau starts to build a table and me of 20 years ago would have looked at that and thought about the tools and skills I don’t have to build a table. Me of today thinks about the space and lumber I don’t have. Not the be a broken record, the lack of tools and skills I still don’t have also block me from taking on a project like building a table. It’s easy to watch this video and find defeat in the variance between Beau’s energy levels and my own. I build and work in Excel on a laptop to make a living. I could not run a marathon today if I tried. The differences between me and Beau are not the lesson I want to take from this video. The lesson is to find the tasks I can do that fit into the time and materials I already have, using the skills I possess while keeping my eyes open for learning new skills.
I also need to be aware of the time horizon. The hook to the episode is doing all these tasks over the course of 24 hours. I don’t need to subject myself to that time horizon. I can set up tasks over a week or a month, or whatever time horizon works for what I have going on in life. What we’re looking for is that momentum of moving to the next task, knowing what the task is, and setting ourselves up to keep the momentum rolling. Even if that means taking a rest. We will see it later in the video, rest is part of this journey and we should not punish ourselves for taking rest when we need it.
Just as a practical application of that concept. I took 3 days off from doing my morning workout. I wasn’t feeling it each morning while my body felt like it needed another recovery day. I’m at the age where more than one recovery day after activity might be required. I took those days and did a workout this morning. I felt great and saw just a smidge of progress. Rest is a task, sometimes that is a few extra breaths before the next leg lift or it’s sleeping an extra two hours on a Saturday morning because your brain and muscles are tired.
Paddle on the River Empathy
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the feelings of another from their frame of reference. There is a moment when Beau pulls an old piece of wood from under the house to start one of his building projects. He tells his wife, Helen, where he got the wood and makes a lovely side comment about the school still being where he found the piece of lumber. Empathy to me includes the noun that goes with the subject. The piece of lumber that will become a canoe paddle came from a school. There is a life, a story that goes with the backbone of what will become a paddle. To me, that makes for a lovely story. The story of the school will carry on with this paddle as long as the story is told. In this case, the story has been told to his wife, and us, the viewer. Odds are we will never see the paddle in person, but Beau’s children will, and from there, the story can continue. This is a moment of presence accented by empathy that makes for a lovely story. A story that may or may not go on, but it’s been given a chance.
Beau leaves for his next lap and this time, he takes a backpack with him to pick up the rubbish on the side of the road. An idea that didn’t exist at the start of the marathon but came to him during his opening three laps. Life throws us lots of tangents and one of the lessons I don’t ever recall anyone telling me was how to deal with tangents. I think the idea was to teach students general focus and hope that they would have the flexibility to adapt to the tangents life has in store. I think life is more complicated than that. My parents didn’t have a social media world to navigate and those in charge of creating education standards didn’t consider “how to run errands” and “how to plan a weekend of activities” as something that should be taught in a school. I watch this part of the video and I see the value of being flexible and see flexibility as a muscle that needs to be worked on over time.
The Dark Lessons of Empathy
As Beau gets back from another lap, he dumps out some collected rubbish and starts to organize the pile. He runs the scenario through his head of what people were thinking when they rolled down their windows and threw a beverage can to the side of the road. These are the same questions I would ask and this scenario exposes the dark side of empathy. When we set a mindset to the default of kindness, plugging the “Empathy Cords” into the minds of those who would throw garbage out of a moving car leads us to a dark place. This feeds a dark flower is despair for humanity and makes us question why bother in the first place.
This is something I struggle with. I want to believe in humanity and there are moments when humanity shines. The lesson I take from this video is to remind myself that humanity will not change unless there are people willing to tell the stories that move humanity farther away from the willful ignorance of others and closer to consideration of everyone and everything we pass by during our day-to-day.
Beau finished this moment in the day with a deep sigh and the line, “Get that funk out of your head.” This is what moving on looks like. This is what believing in the story you’re telling looks like. Influence that which we can influence and clean up what we can clean up. The small positive actions of the many are the steps we need as a people to become better stewards of the planet and each other.
One Modification
At one point Beau says “half your day should be like this all the time.” I love the idea of having task after task lined up and making my way through a list of what needs to be done. I don’t feel this is a realistic expectation for a majority of people. “All the time” may not have been meant to equal every day, but this comment skirts the line of high expectations for the realities of life. There are a lot of specific decisions people need to make in order to build a life that supports the kind of task marathon we see in the video. I am not confident there are a lot of people in the world who even have the opportunity to make these decisions. This kind of life requires a shift in the way the world and society is organized. I think people would be happier in this kind of life, but there are a lot of changes to the structure of society if we are to reach the point where people can live their lives like this all the time.
Humanity and Its Tools
I watch this and I see all the tools Beau has collected over time that allow him to build and fix all the things he works. I look at my own life, and I don’t have the tools for woodworking, but I do have the tools for writing and creativity. What are the tools you can collect yourself that support the things you WANT to do with your life?
“Tools keep him going” is the line I wrote in my notes. Tools provide the ability to make tasks easier. Tools move us through our tasks. We see Beau move quickly through building and fixing with the aid of tools and years of experience. I think about myself trying to do things and when I don’t have the tools, I hit stopping points and I may or may not know how or what I need to keep going. The lesson is, as we go through life, what are the tools we can claim and take with us in preparation for future tasks?
Said another way, watch this and think about the tools you have in your life. How do they make life easier? Action leads to a second action and tools make action easier to complete.
When the road gets dark
Almost asleep, the alarm goes and Beau goes from almost passed out to feeling alive. Running in the darkness, alone with your thoughts, the world becomes more visible then a flame shows itself as a beacon of where he started. Once the legs are going the momentum will carry you along. I love the imagery but the reality is that this is the kind of effort, even if it was for 6-8 hours that need to be trained for or needs to be built into an individual’s existence. Kids, pets, work, etc. are all things that compete for our hours of the day. As we age, our bodies forget what it was like to push ourselves. The idea of “getting the legs going” moves away from youth, then the muscle memory goes, then age starts to win then we just forget. That doesn’t mean we have to let time and life take over. This is something we should be thinking about and teaching to young people. This kind of activity should be built into life early and things like work should be built around the activity rather than the activity being left to atrophy in the shadows of life.
What’s the Point of all This?
By the end of the video, Beau says he wasn’t sure what this day was. “It was full and he has chafe”. The overall feeling was that this day was positive for Beau. There are lessons big and small to be taken from this story and I encourage you to watch and translate this experiment into your own life. We don’t need to fit something like this into a 24-hour period, but what about a 90-minute period? What about a 15-minute period this week and a 20-minute period next week? “Stuck” is the word I often write in my own journal. Stuck in the sticky pit that is life. At some point, I have to ask, would I not be happier if I was working toward clearing away personal tasks that add to the muck? Does the clearing of my own list of tasks take away the stickiness of the world around me? It’s never too late to start making a string of decisions that will lead to building the life I want. Even if that means passing on the lessons of a partially ideal life, I’m on the path and gaining the tools so I can pass on the skills of life.
CHR;)
