Keep On Keeping On: Broken Feet, Failed Discipline, and Trying Again

At 19, I climbed Reaper Mountain in Marine Corps boot camp with hairline fractures in both feet. At 42, I'm trying to get back in shape after three years of failure. This episode is about what it means to keep showing up when you know you might fail.

I tell three stories about broken feet:

Story 1: The Crucible, 2003. Sleep-deprived, starving, both metatarsal bones fractured. Looking up at an impossibly steep mountain. A drill instructor offering me an out: "Get in the truck." My choice, and what happened next.

Story 2: Three years ago, I felt invincible from meditation and committed to "90 Days of Perfect Discipline for God." I failed within weeks. The shame crushed me. I've been carrying that weight ever since.

Story 3: Now. I'm trying again. Not because I'm confident this time, but because showing up when you're broken is the only practice that matters.

Along the way, we explore:
- Why darkness has to have its day (and what happens when you stop resisting)
- Lao Tzu's teaching that your enemy is the shadow you cast
- What Neo's surrender to Agent Smith reveals about unwinnable battles
- King Théoden's transformation from "How did it come to this?" to "Ride to ruin!"
- Sam Gamgee's words about why we keep going when everything seems lost

This isn't toxic positivity. It's the gritty realism of continuing anyway.

Featuring wisdom from: Isaiah 45:7, Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), Shunryu Suzuki, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and Foxy Shazam's "Oh Lord."

For anyone who's failed and is trying again: this one's for you.

Chapters

• 1:00 There's Always a War to Fight
• 2:27 The Crucible: Reaper Mountain
• 9:53 Sitting in the Bleachers
• 13:37 From Man to Marine
• 20:35 90 Days for God (And the Shame Spiral)
• 25:02 The Wisdom of Darkness
• 38:39 Keep On Keeping On

Transcript

Jacob: 0:01

We get to the bottom of Reaper Mountain and we throw our packs down and we we get to sit. I'm just like, how am I gonna do this? I look up at this mammoth of a mountain. Imagine having hairline fractures in your feet, and you're looking up at this mountain. 19-year-old kid, you desperately don't want to get held back, you want to graduate. So we start hiking towards the mountain, and the pain is just agonizing. After a while, it was like my feet started to go almost numb. But I'm looking over, and there's a truck with one of our drone instructors driving it, you know, and he's like shouting at us like, who wants to get in the truck? You know, like if you get in the back of the truck and give up, you have to do it again. You have to wait a week or two and do it again. I'm like, hell no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I was doing uh deliveries when a song came on, and uh something just clicked about me getting back in shape. I've been I've been wanting to get back in shape for a while, and this is a song by Foxy Shazam. It's called Oh Lord. And the lyrics go because there is always a wrong to your right. There will always be a war somewhere to fight. And God knows I've had some rough effing years. Oh, oh Lord, oh Lord, keep on, keep it on. This is just a truth in life that there's always going to be a struggle. There's never going to be a point in your life where there will not be struggle or will not be conflict. And if you are going through life thinking, why me? Woe is me, well, when I get here, then I'll be happy. I have bad news for you. That is never going to come. That is what life is. It's it's woven all throughout life, and we're going to talk about that on this episode. It's about this is about what it means to keep going when you know the fight isn't going to end. It never ends. And first, I want to tell you a story about where I was about 23 years ago. This is all the way back in 2003 in Camp Pendleton, California, um, Reaper Mountain. I was 19 years old. I joined the Marine Corps because uh there was a lot of you know propaganda on TV about 9-11. I wanted to, you know, suit up and do something to uh kind of fight back and uh protect the country, quote unquote. So I joined the Marine Corps. I graduated high school, I didn't know what to do with my life, you know, and I was like, let's join the Marine Corps, that's crazy. So 19 years old, Marine Corps boot camp, and uh this is like late March probably, uh, there's an event, uh kind of a defining event in the three-month boot camp. And towards the end, there was the defining event called the Crucible event, which is where you it's a three-day, like 72-hour test of might, if you will. They they give you barely any food. I think they give you one meal, one MRE, like one ration to last you three days. And you can kind of eat it as fast or as slow as you want. So we all tried to like eat as slowly as possible to ration our food out. It's the final test before graduation. You have to go through this to graduate. You know, you're sleep deprived on this event as well. You got barely a few hours of sleep for three days. You're constantly on the move. You're hiking, I think it was over well over a hundred miles, and you would carry like a hundred-pound pack on your back, which got real heavy, especially in the morning when it was damp. And we are on the way to the what we call Reaper Mountain. It's the final thing we have to hike over. Reaper Mountain was very steep. I'm sure you can Google pictures of it. Just Google um Marine Corps Reaper Mountain, you'll see it. It's so steep that you can like just reach your hand straight out and touch it as you're hiking up it. I mean, this is something you could start falling and rolling down. It's so steep, it's crazy. So we're hiking. It's the second night, so we're all exhausted, starving, completely sleep deprived, some of us hallucinating because we're so exhausted. And um it's almost early morning dawn, and we were going to hike to Reaper Mountain, camp at the bottom for uh maybe 30 minutes to rest, and then hike up and over the mountain. As we're hiking and we get close to the mountain, we're coming around this bend, and I remember I felt something in my right foot, like this sharp shooting pain that was like intense. And it turned out to be a hairline fracture in the metatarsal bone on the top of my right foot. It was like the center one, I think, middle digit. And I literally, it was like I went to go step on my foot, and I just I can only describe it as like imagine you you you're just walking and then you just feel a bone break. To anyone listening who's fractured a bone, you know what this feels like. It's a very disconcerting feeling. It's like, this is my body. I walk on my body, I depend on my skeleton, and now my skeleton is breaking. Like, what? So I just felt this bone just crack in my right foot. I just knew something was not right, you know. I didn't know it was a hairline fracture in my metatarsal bone, but I knew something was wrong. It really hurt. And I my mouth was sealed, I was not gonna tell anyone anything. So I started limping, trying to push through. And in my mind, I'm like, there's no way I'm getting held back. I am getting through this challenge. And um, you know, I was like, if anyone asks, I'll just say it's a callus or a uh a blister tear or something like that. So as we are as we are coming up to Reaper Mountain, I felt my right foot snapped. And then when I started limping more on my left foot, guess what happened? My left more foot uh snapped a metatorsal bone as well. So I literally had two hairline fracture bones in my metators in both feet as we're coming up to Reaper Mountain. Now, after you hike over Reaper Mountain, there's still a, I think it was like a 10-mile hike home. I could be wrong on that. It it felt like at least 10 miles. And this is after we've already hiked, you know, over 100 miles, done multiple tests, things like that. So we get to the bottom of Reaper Mountain and we throw our packs down and we we get to sit, and I'm just like, how am I gonna do this? I look up at this mammoth of a mountain, and I'm like, dude, I can barely walk. Imagine having hairline fractures in your feet, and you're looking up at this mountain, 19-year-old kid, you desperately don't want to get held back, you want to graduate. I'm like, how am I gonna do this? So we get up, they announce it's time to move, and as soon as I get stand up, I'm immediately feeling immense pain on both feet. So we start hiking towards the mountain, and the pain is just agonizing, agonizing pain. I can't even describe it to you in words. You just have to feel it. It was just so intense, lightning pain. After a while, it was like my feet started to go almost numb. And I was like, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing or if it's gonna make it worse. But I'm looking over and there's a truck with one of our drill instructors driving it, you know, and he's like shouting at us like, who wants to get in the truck? You know, like if you get in the back of the truck and give up, you have to do it again. You have to wait a week or two and do it again. I'm like, hell no. So I make it to the top. Tears are starting to come out of my eyes, and most of us were crying at that point because we did something so incredibly challenging. And then I think if I recall, they raised a flag, they did like a speech, you know, they said, welcome to the Marine Corps, blah, blah, blah. We still had to make it back though. And I would say on the way down was worse because if you've ever gone downhill for a significant amount of time, you know it can be rough on your knees and your feet the way you're coming down. And it was even more excruciating on the way down. To give you an idea of how exhausted I was, on the way back, I fell asleep several times while marching. I'm not joking. Like, imagine a platoon of Marines walking, and I'm so tired. I'm literally sleepwalking. And then when we stop, I would bump into the guy in front of me and I would apologize and say, I'm sorry I was asleep. I mean, it was insane. Absolute insanity. Sheer exhaustion. When we got back, I literally collapsed on the ground and I needed help standing again. I mean, all of us were destroyed. Drill instructors, you know, they ate with us, and it was a weird feeling having a drill instructor sit with us as equals or peers, you know. It's like we went from recruit to marine just suddenly, the snap of a finger, it felt like. So the aftermath of all this, I I did grab, I did end up graduating. However, uh, because of the metatorsal fractures in both feet, I finally reported my injuries after I officially completed the challenge. That way I couldn't get held back. So they take me into the medic or the doctor, and the doctor says, you know, you've got these two hairline fractures, you're going to need casts on both feet. What this meant for me is that I was not allowed to march on the parade deck for graduation because I had to have casts on both feet. Now, these casts were actually like detachable, so they weren't like permanent molds or anything. I could take them on and off, you know, to go shower, put them back on uh and walk around with them in crutches. They started calling me by the nickname of Stormtrooper because I had these two big white boot casts on. So embarrassing. I already missed my high school graduation. Um, the last year of high school, I actually switched to homeschooling uh in my senior year to help my mom with babysitting for my younger sister. So I didn't get to graduate with my high school class. I was really looking forward to graduating with my Marine Corps uh platoon, uh 1063, we were. And um I was really sad when I found the news that I wasn't going to be able to graduate with them because the parade deck, it's can in the Marine Corps, it's considered like sacred ground. Marines have walked across that deck who have died, and um, you know, it's been like sacred ground for many, many years. Like you don't, if you go to Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, nobody walks on the parade deck except people who have a purpose to be there, like people graduating, things like that, or um like color guards, you know, things like that. Uh, there's like a big curb that surrounds it, I remember. And you were not to step over that curb and walk on the parade deck. You get chewed out if you did. And part of the parade deck uniformity was that, you know, nobody could be on the parade deck with um casts, you know, everything had to be uniform. I couldn't march with my unit because I wasn't uniformed because I was wearing these two casts. So during rehearsals, I would take off my cast boots and sneak into the unit and practice with everyone so that way I could prove it to um, you know, my drill instructors that I was able to march and rehearse and do everything just perfectly. And I was. It hurt like hell, and I knew it wasn't a good idea, but I just really wanted to graduate with them. And eventually my drill instructor noticed, he pulled me into his private office and he said, What the hell are you doing? You are under orders to wear those. You know, your feet are they have bone fractures, and I started crying to him. A lot of us cried a lot in boot camp. Truth be told, we're all teenage kids going through extreme trauma in boot camp. You know, anytime you get a uh a recruit uh alone, you know, they're gonna start letting their emotions out. And I cried to him. I said, I really need to be in this march. I need to graduate. I begged and pleaded, and he wouldn't do it. He said it was against medical orders. So I had to sit in the bleachers and watch my unit graduate without me. He was nice enough to make a concession, though, where he said, during graduation, I don't need to wear my uh boots, my my cast boots. So he let me take those off, and at least I could dress in proper uniform. But I'm like sitting there in my service alphas watching my entire platoon graduate without me. It was devastating. But at least I graduated. And uh towards the end, you know, I was on firewatch duty one night and I had a lot of time to think and contemplate, and I wrote this poem that I wanted to read to you guys. I called it From Man to Marine. And I'm gonna read it exactly as I wrote it. Uh, you know, this is like 23 years ago. Looking back on it, I'm like, oh, I maybe I would have worded it this way now, but I'm like, I'm just gonna read it exactly as I wrote it. So from man to marine, I wrote, We all live to die, but I am dying to live. That's what this is for. Why I joined the Corps. I said my goodbyes and told my mom not to cry. I'll be all right. My future is bright. Onto the footprints of yellow we stood, hiding our fears as best we could. They stripped us of self, boxed up on a shelf. We were now a team, a team all in green, wondering if we would ever be called a marine. They taught their way to eat, drink, and sleep, had us lined up like little sheep. The way things were run, the time really did fly. And as time grew on, so did our pride. Our faces grew hard and our chests stern, yet survival and rifles we still had to learn. Up north we went, up north to the cold, where marines are made, or so we were told. They taught us our rifles, how to shoot them their way, how to kill a man five hundred yards away. Outdoors in the field with blistering feet. They taught us to live with no food and no sleep. And then came the hike, most feared by all, the one who decides who stands and who falls. Onward in darkness, a silence awoken. This young man's feet had now become broken. Up rose the sun, revealing the reaper, a mountain so high it couldn't be any steeper. At the base of the mountain stood this mother's son, wondering how this obstacle would be won. Standing there with broken feet, how would I ever join the elite? Failing now I couldn't afford. So I closed my eyes and prayed to the Lord. Up and over I triumphed with glory, which brings an end to this story. Who knows how this story ends? At least I'll see my family and friends. And now begins the rest of my life. How about a kid and a lovely wife? Now, at least in uniform or jeans, I can call myself a United States Marine. Let me know what you thought of that if you can. It's funny, when I had a lot of time to contemplate and write that, I really started to feel, if I'm being honest with you guys, that I did not want to be in the Marine Corps. Um not because I couldn't handle it, I absolutely could. Um my physical fitness test scores were excellent. You know, I could handle these tests. My will obviously was stronger than the bones in my feet, so that's good. But I just realized in that silence that I wanted a family. And that's another story. But you know, the the story obviously didn't end there. I was I was watching the the unit graduate without me. And like the poem says, I know I made it over the mountain, but the glory that I imagined, I don't know, it just wasn't the way that I felt or envisioned it. It was like that moment I realized I really don't want to be in the service. So at that moment I knew I had made up my mind. I wasn't gonna do this as a career, I was gonna do my time and get out, which I did. And I really wanted a family. And I don't want to digress into that, but in terms of like physical fitness, which is where we started with this episode, I remember I I went through a lot of yo-yo dieting years, and um I had this illusion of control where I really am good at at training and exercise and nutrition, but I would go through these periods where I would just shelve it and give in to uh you know my cravings. And you know, you fast forward through the years after the Marines, I'm in shape, I'm out of shape, I'm in in and out of shape. There's like this cycle. And when I'm in shape, I would feel so confident, energetic. And um I when I would go into these cycles of being in shape and feeling good and confident and liking the attention, feeling good with the health markers, uh, then I would go out of shape. You know, I would get uh I would slack off and I would just Carls Jr. two uh jalapeno burgers, please. And then I'd feel ashamed, you know, my face would get puffy, and I'd didn't want to look in the mirror, and health concerns would start creeping in, and it would just go from this cycle of like discipline to binging and yo-yo back and forth. Oh, I'd be so strict and lose the weight and feel invincible, and then life would happen, you know, stress would hit, I'd fall off the wagon, and the cycle has repeated for so many years now. I mean, I wish I could film my wife candidly uh and me telling her I'm gonna go on a diet. She'll you'll just see her roll her eyes, you know, like, oh boy, here we go again. But it really hit me because um I think it was like 15 years ago or so, 14 years old. 14, 15 years ago, I really started to take my health much more seriously. And I started to really dive into self-education when it comes to nutrition, proper training methods. It really started with that P90X program, if you guys remember. It's like an at-home workout program. And I took it so seriously, and I got an amazing shape. You know, these little 90-day cycles kind of stuck with me after that program. And I would do like training programs with barbell, you know, squat bench, deadlift, things like that. And long story short, three years ago, I was in a uh deep meditation practice uh already. You know, that's when I started my meditation practice, and I felt invincible. I felt like I could quit or do anything I wanted. I was a brand new meditator, and I had never before experienced uh cultivating mindfulness to this degree. I experimented with like quitting energy drinks, and it was no problem. I was excited to experience the withdrawals of quitting caffeine or reducing energy drinks. Do you know anyone in your life who's ever been excited about withdrawals? I was like, oh, bring on this experience. I get to hold this in mindfulness. And it worked. A lot of the things I did worked. I mean, meditation is a powerful thing. It doesn't just give you inner peace, but it gives you the ability to do things you could not do before. But it doesn't make you invincible. I felt invincible, but that's where I was still kind of like a meditating newbie, if you will, and I didn't realize my own shortcomings. And I decided I was going to do a quote unquote 90 days of perfect discipline for God. That's the way I phrased it in my mind. Perfect eating, perfect training, perfect spiritual practice. I was like, this is it. I'm gonna get in the best shape of my life. People are gonna be like, wow, how did you do it? You know, how did you overcome your desires? Well, I just held them in awareness, no problem. And guess what happens? About a week or two in, maybe three weeks, I remember it was long enough for me to throw out some of my baggier clothes. I was like, I'm never going back to these. And my wife was like, Are you sure? It was like a week later, I fell off the wagon. And the guilt hit me so hard. The negative self-talk started creeping up in my head. You can't even do this for God. You promised. You promised Maharaja, you promised God, you promised, you know, whoever you pray to. I was like, wow, I'm not invincible. And then the voice started appearing in my head. You're weak. You always fail. The shame spiral. But the amazing thing is the meditation practice stayed with me. I kept showing up on the cushion. And during meditation, I would sit with these negative self-talk uh thought loops in my head. And okay, this is the present moment. This is what failure feels like. This is what negative self-talk feels like. And eventually it quieted down. You know, but the body, it was like I never recovered physically. I've been out of shape now for like three years. I let that war go, basically, but I've been kind of carrying the guilt about it for this whole period because I'm I'm used to always being in shape. If you ask my friends, most of my life, I've been in pretty good shape. You know, in spite of my past yo-yo experiences, I had never been like this out of shape. And, you know, I'm not like humongous or anything, but I'm not at a healthy weight, and it's not a comfortable weight for me. And I get those feelings like I this isn't me. This is like a suit I'm wearing, the real me is underneath. I'm sure some of you listening can relate, or at least I hope some of you can. But I've been carrying that. And it's it's caused me to have some dark days, you know. Like I just I miss waking up and just flying out of bed and being able to move quickly and run upstairs quickly. And it's been such a long period of time now where I consistently have not been able to factor training back into my life. And I know a big part of that is my insane work schedule, cost of living, all of that external stuff. But I know that if I really wanted to, if I had that burning desire deep down, I would make it happen. I mean, if if I'm able to make a podcast happen in all of my uh busy schedule, I can make um, you know, 45 minutes or an hour happen so I could train three times a week and be consistent with my eating. So it kind of reminded me of um, I don't know if you guys have ever seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If you haven't, you should, because they're great. They're not just fantasy films, they teach you about the human experience through myth. And in um the second film, you meet King Theodon. He's kind of like this king over a horse kingdom, and um, they are completely overrun by these orcs or um urukai, they're like big goblin orc people, and it's like this immense violence, and he just kind of speaks to himself in this melancholic way where he says in a reflective way, remembering the good times, you know, he's like, Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the west, behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this? You really gotta see the film for that to hit you as hard as it uh as it does when when you just man, the way it's directed. The book, of course, is great, the film is fantastic, and this moment of just complete despair. It's like this this guy is looking back at his life and how it used to be and how crazy it is now, how much it's it's fallen into shadow, and it just it resonates with me. It's like, where is the marine that I used to be who climbed this Reaper mountain? Where is the man who felt invincible three years ago that he could do this 90 days for God challenge? They've passed like rain on the mountain. But how did it come to this? And I started thinking to myself, here's what I've been learning is that dark I had this thought, and I've had this thought for a while. It's like darkness, it has to have its day. There's a wisdom in losing gracefully. Like I mentioned earlier in this episode, there are there are just battles in life and conflicts, and that's part of life. It's woven into the fabric of existence. And sometimes you just have to let darkness have its day. You will not always win. And that is not failure, that's just reality. The key is that you can lose with humility. There's kind of like a there's like there's kind of like its own strength to that, you know, when you lose with humility, as opposed to getting down and beating yourself up about it. When life serves you the downs, you let them be down. You stop resisting. And you get that much more of a rebound when you come out of it. I'm not saying dive into despair, but if you're feeling despair, give that air, give that its own space to breathe. Don't resist it. Even in um in the Bible, if you go back to the prophet Isaiah in the 45th chapter, he he writes, and of course, he is the mouthpiece for God if you read the Bible, he says, I form light and create darkness. I make weal and create woe. I, Yahweh, do all these things. So he's pointing out here that God doesn't just create the light, but God creates the darkness too, the good and the calamity. All of it is inextorably linked to and woven together. I've said this on many episodes before. You cannot, you cannot have up without down. You cannot have black without white. You cannot have self without other. All of these opposites are woven together into one fabric that we call life. Oh, it's like not to pull too many movie quotes here, but uh, if you guys have ever seen that movie Hook with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, uh, Dustin Hoffman has this fantastic line. He plays Captain Hook, and there's this short little line with so much wisdom in it. He says, What would the world be like without Captain Hook? He says it more of a in an upcharge way. What would the world be like without Captain Hook? But you know, it if you think about that for a moment, like what would the world be like without conflict? Have you ever seen a good movie without conflict, without a bad guy, without a without some adversity to overcome? That's it's like the the salt and the stew. You know, it's the it's the flavor of life. Conflict is not an aberration in life, it's not this anomaly, it's not something that went wrong with the universe. It's built into the fabric of existence. Even inside your body, your immune systems are fighting wars to keep us alive. There's also uh conflicts that keep you healthy, like good bacteria and bad bacteria. There has to be a balance between the two. If you zoom in on any living person or organism, there's all kinds of wars happening on a molecular level. You know, natural selection is not an instinct to survive. Survival, there's no there's no such thing as survival instinct. Survival just happens until it doesn't. So there's always going to be these wars happening in life. They don't end. And I I pulled a reading from Lao Tzu in the Dao De Ching, verse 61. He he he was a Taoist philosopher that wrote about power and humility. And he says, When a country obtains great power, it becomes like the sea. All streams run down toward it, into it. The more powerful it grows, the greater the need for humility. Humility means trusting the Tao, thus never needing to be defensive. A great nation is like a great man. When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers. He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts. If a nation is centered in the Tao, if it nourishes its own people and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others, it will be a light to all nations in the world. I love that quote because he says he thinks of an enemy as this shadow that he himself casts. So the the enemy is not outside of you. Yo-yo dieting is not this external demon attacking me, it's the shadow that I am casting by trying to stand in the light. Essentially, the fact that I want to better myself is creating the potentiality of failure of yo-yo dieting. You can't have one without the other. And I was reminded of another scene that that really struck me as a kind of a visual example of this. If you guys have ever seen the Matrix trilogy, fantastic films. The center uh the main protagonist, Neo, his uh arch nemesis or rival is Agent Smith. He's this computer program hellbent on destroying the Matrix and all the people that live in the Matrix. And they get it escalates and escalates and escalates. And every time Neo gets more powerful, Agent Smith gets more powerful. And it's to the point where the whole entire Matrix is on the verge of collapse. Agent Smith is assimilated just about everyone on on the on the entire Matrix, and the battle is like this epic battle between gods, and there's there's no progress happening. And then Adeo has this realization that he has to die, that he is the cause of his opposite, Smith, rising. So he allows himself to be absorbed into Smith, and in that surrender, the conflict resolves itself. Because sometimes the way through is not more resistance to the thing, it's the radical acceptance that the fight itself might be the pattern that we're actually trapped in. What changes is not whether the war exists, but your relationship to it. It's like a paradigm shift. So for me, it was the more I tried to fight with myself with this yo-yo dieting, I mean, it's probably I'm not exaggerating when I tell you guys this, over the last three years, I probably yo-yo dieted like a hundred times at least. Where I I'd start my diet and I'd get a week or two weeks or three weeks or four weeks in, whatever, maybe a day, and then I would just give up and go back, you know. It was like all or nothing. And now I'm I'm changing my relationship to it. I've kind of I gave up on it for a while. I said, I'm gonna let darkness have its day, and I rested, and I came to this conclusion that I do have the desire to get back in shape and I have the discipline to show up, but I needed to let darkness have its day for a while to just reset, to breathe, to remember to love myself again. And now I have that resolution, that um that resolve inside of me to get this done. And I'm I'm kind of putting myself on the line here by putting it out on this podcast episode that I'm gonna do this. So it's kind of nerve-wracking. Like if you guys check in with me in a few months and I'm like 300 pounds, I'm gonna be embarrassed and hopefully you still love me. But hopefully I'll be 175 pounds and looking pretty svelt. We'll see. Maybe my voice will sound sexier over the microphone as well. You never know. You know, having uh a more lean neck might actually improve the uh the quality of my voice, or maybe it'll make it worse. You guys will have to let me know on that one. We'll see how that goes. But it's interesting, there's a paradox in the word uh resolve or resolution. I don't have the uh etymology pulled up in front of me, but I remember uh reading about it how I think it's like Greek roots, and it means like loosening the knots or untying something. And yet, resolve or resolute, it has that image of sternness, of a firm, you know what I mean, like he is resolute in his goal, you know, he is resolved to solving this thing and uh committed. It's like a decision, a determination, but it's also the dissolving of something. And I think that is for me, my my being resolute is admirably purposeful, determined, and unwavering, but at the same time, I'm loose and I'm loving myself and I'm giving myself permission to fail. So it's weird how it has like that paradoxical quality to it where it's like loosening a knot, but it's also being firm and kind of setting your sights on something without giving up. But I'm gonna remember this time when I when I do my training and my nutrition, uh, quote from uh Shunryu Suzuki. Uh, he says, Each of you is perfect the way you are, and you can still use a little improvement. So, you know what? If I fail, I'm still perfect just the way I am, but I'm still going to do my absolute best. You know, that's the whole teaching. You're perfect as you are. Broken feet, failed attempts, sitting in the bleachers, and you can use improvement. So it's like there's these two truths happening at the same time: discipline and grace, effort and also acceptance. I'm gonna put the effort in, and I'm also gonna accept myself if I fail. Or maybe I'll make it all the way to 175 pounds where I want to be, and then when I'm there, maybe I'll backslide again. I don't know. I'm just gonna keep on keeping on, I'm gonna keep moving forward. So my plans now, I'm putting this out there to you guys. I am planning to get back in shape, and that's not because I think I will be perfect this time, it's not because I I'm feeling invincible, it's because showing up is the practice. This time it's different for me because I am not aiming for perfection. I've failed before, I'll probably fail again, but I also know that failing does not disqualify me from trying. You know, the Marine Corps taught me you can be broken and still finish. Um, meditating also taught me that you can fail and still show up the next day. Sometimes when I sit, my meditation sessions are insane all over the place. But I've learned that meditation is not supposed to look a certain way, it's not supposed to be all peace and rainbows. It is what it is. You are sitting there to observe what is. So I'm bringing both of those truths together. I'm bringing the body and the spirit together, the discipline, the grace, the love, the devotion, all of it. And to tie it back to Theodon, you know, he um if you've ever seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Theodon. Biden did not stay in a place of grief. He didn't sit around thinking, How did it come to this? I missed the old days. And in the third film, he gathers all his men together from several kingdoms, and they chose defiance. They chose to charge against the enemy, knowing that it would be the end of all mankind forever. And this is his speech to motivate everyone. And you got to see the film, because obviously I'm not going to do it justice. I'm also not going to scream into the microphone in your ear. But he says, Arise, arise, riders of Theodon, fell deeds awake, fire and slaughter, spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword day, a red day, ere the sun rises. Ride now, ride now, ride to Gondor. And then he screams Death, Death, Death, holding his sword up in the air. And then he says, Ride now, ride now, ride, ride to ruin and the world's ending. Death. And that it is the most beautiful moment in the trilogy, in my opinion, because these are human beings who understand that they cannot win this fight, that they are going to die, that darkness has descended upon them. And what do they do? They stand up, they mount up on their horses, and they are shouting death, you know, to death, to death. Like they are ready and willing to face even death. And they charge. And I'm not gonna spoil the film. But that's the mentality that they had that in the middle of an unwinnable battle, they will still show up to the plate and they will swing. So that's where I am. You know, I am going to show up and I might fail. I might become a 300-pound uh you know couch dweller. I might fail. But I may not. I might get in shape. I might reclaim my lean physique that I used to have and get svelt and post pictures for you guys, make you all jealous. I'm joking. I love you. I don't know. We're gonna see how it goes. The point that I'm trying to bring home here is that there is always, always going to be a war to fight. Like that song that came on that inspired me to talk about this today. The lyric says, because there is always a wrong to your right, and there will always be a war somewhere to fight. And God knows I've had some rough effing years. Oh, oh Lord, oh Lord, keep on keeping on. I love that song. Check it out. Foxy Shazam. The song is called Oh Lord. The point is, there's always going to be wrong in life to the rights that you do. There's always going to be a war somewhere to fight. There's always going to be fires to put out. This is not pessimism. This is not defeat. This is just reality. Light creates shadow. Good creates the possibility of calamity. Living creates the certainty of dying. And all of it, all of it is woven together by whatever force you want to call it. You know, at God, the Tao, the Dharma, universe, ground of being, the simulation, whatever word you have for this mystery. That is an unmistakable part of it. So I'm not aiming for invincibility anymore. I'm not trying to win this war, quote unquote, once and for all. I am aiming for faithfulness to the practice of showing up. Even when I'm broken, especially when I'm broken, and because the broken feet that I had, they still climbed that mountain. And the broken discipline, it still kept me on that cushion. When I felt like a complete failure for you know, making a commitment to God for 90 days to get in shape, and I failed right away. I still kept showing up on the cushion and sitting with myself and my feelings, and I'm coming back. You know, here I am three years later. I'm gonna make a commitment again, and I might fail, but gosh darn it, I'm going to try. This broken body can still try again. So I'm not holding on to the promise that it gets easier or the belief that someday this war will end, but that it's just worth fighting for, you know. There was uh I I was thinking about Lord of the Rings when I thought about those quotes, and um, you know, there's there's there's a a saying from Sam Wise Gamge that I wanted to close out with. Before I do, as always, please, I can't build this podcast without you guys. I can't. So please leave a review, please share, please like, subscribe, do all the things. Please reach out to me. Let me know how I'm doing, what you want me to talk about. I cannot do this without you. But to to close out, I wanted to give you one last quote from Lord of the Rings here. It's from Sam Wise Gamge, coolest character in the whole franchise, if if uh if it was up to me. And it was when uh Frodo, his traveling partner, who's carrying this ring of evil that he has to destroy, and Frodo is overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed. He literally is trying to give up. And Frodo says to him, I can't do this, Sam. And Sam says, I know. It's all wrong. By rights, we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something. What are we holding on to, Sam? That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for. Thank you so much for listening. Blessings to all the time.