The Wall
Sean Moore
We don’t need no education.
Yesterday I talked about running, and how getting started can be the hardest part. But there’s another part of the run that I dread – more so, perhaps, than getting started itself.
The wall. That terrible feeling you get, when your body is telling you “no more!”, or your brain is telling you “you have more important things to do than run right now!”. It hits all of a sudden, without warning, and when it comes all motivation disappears. There’s no energy left in the legs, no drive to take one step further.
I admire those runners that have been at it forever. They always say, once you get past that wall, that’s where the runner’s high is, the true enjoyment. That’s where you want to be. If only
Most of the time, when that wall hits, I slow down, I drag, and I might even come to a stop, if only temporarily. There’s no better way to show myself that there’s nothing to fear about hitting the wall than taking a break for a second and letting it pass. But, in a way it’s a way of giving up the fight.
Walls are everywhere – no, no, not those walls! – ready to show up in all areas of what we do. The always appear when we are facing the unknown, when we challenge ourselves. Sure, we could avoid them by solving uninteresting problems, but where’s the fun in that?
And in the same way, too, what lies beyond the wall is what’s really interesting. In starting a design problem, or an engineering implementation, or what ever knowledge work you may be doing, our first attempts draw upon the knowledge that we know. The wall is that lurking realization that we really have no clue what we’re talking about. It’s that barrier to entry, that learning curve, where you need to truly understand the problem in order to succeed.
But once you’ve come to grasp the field, the real interesting work begins. You’re on a level playing field again; rather than learning the system, you could do work. And that’s where that high comes, where you get lost for hours enjoying solving problems.
Every once in a while, rather than letting the wall drag me down, I let that fear invigorate me. It fills me, and rather than stopping me in my tracks, I take off. Outrun the wall, and you’ll outrun that fear, that drain too. One foot at a time, one brick at a time, and the wall starts to go away.