George Jejelava, Period 7, 3/2/22

 Socio-political Consciousness: How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

“I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is will always be two hundred pounds”

• Henry Rollins

    If you never achieve a personal record again, would you continue to train? This is a question that my brother asked me several weeks ago after a particularly taxing weightlifting session. In the broad sense of the term “training,” of course I would. The health benefits of general strength training are something that I will never relinquish. But the question is deeper than that. My approach to weightlifting, running, cycling, or any other physical activity has always been to progress little by little; to be better today than I was yesterday. That has always been the safest way to approach one’s goals: the only person you have to be better than is your past self. But there’s a daunting problem with that: to be better than I have ever been, I will need to do more work than I have ever done. Maybe a month from now I’ll be ready to embark on that journey, but I don’t think I’ll be able to today. So the question remains: why am I in the gym today? The stark reality that I’m coming to grips with is that I’m bored. It’s because my mind races and maybe I’m a little bit scared for my future. And maybe, to a lesser extent, I refuse to relinquish the part of myself that I know best in lieu of fear. I am choosing to be Sisyphus because at least Sisyphus had something to do. To be purposefully driven is all we can do.

    The reality of the world is that we all act independently. There are times when I’ll sit on my phone for hours and make up some narrative about society and the problems around me. The mind is such a tricky thing that it will misconstrue boredom, and its resulting anxiety, with sociological problems that I’m not even remotely experiencing. With each swipe of my thumb, the line between what I can and cannot control seems to grow more blurred; and to me, weightlifting is a way to redraw that line. Everyone has their own gym. My current thoughts on power are that we’d all be a whole lot stronger if we learned to reflect inward before looking outward.