"Give Anything"

As a freshman on my high school's cross country team, our captain told me that to be a good runner, you needed to love pain.

I objected: a great runner could love to race, I said, and endure the pain only for the sake of competing and winning.

It's only fifteen years later (practically one foot in the grave), that I now see that I was wrong and he was right.

You can run out of habit or you can run because Coach would notice if you skip practice, but you cannot run because of the strictly instrumental effect that not-running would have on your goals. Our minds aren't built that way; what is separable conceptually is not separable architecturally.

Ultimately, to not sacrifice the gift, you have to love pain. You have to love life.

3 thoughts on “"Give Anything"

  1. >"It's only fifteen years later (practically one foot in the grave)"

    What? don't you believe in life extension and other SL3 concepts?
    Don't you believe that you'll be around for at least another 3^^^3 days or shit like that?
    Have you given up hope that quickly, you weasel?

  2. P.S. Just in case some weasel tries to correct my previous comment, I know that life extension (even radical life extension) is SL2, not SL3. But living for 3^^^3 days or microseconds far surpasses even super-radical life extension (and effective immortality) by so much that it becomes SL3, and even pushes SL4. Trying to imagine living for three triple-arrow three microseconds is unimaginable. And SL4 is all about trying to imagine the unimaginable.

  3. Pain x Resistance = Suffering -- Buddha, apparently?

    (I tried to find where this was from, and am running across multiple seemingly authoritative sites pointing at early Buddhism for having already figured this out.)

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