I tell myself not to read books. They only give me ideas, update me, or scare me. And if it wasn’t for my trusty Kindle I wouldn’t read so much. Downloading a new book is really easy, and I can read better from the screen on my Kindle classic than I ever could off a paper page.

My latest news is that individuals aren’t really individuals at all. I mean by that, that there’s no one true self. This isn’t that we aren’t the same person as we were years ago, and will be many years from now – which is correct – emotionally, but not legally. We are dividuals.

We are used to the idea that the human brain has two hemispheres. The left brain controls the right side of the body, and the right brain controls the left side of the body. There’s nothing new saying this, and apparently it was something to do with our fishy ancestors rotating their heads so mammals could have their eyes pointing forwards. The idea that one side is logical and one side is more emotional isn’t headline making either. The real insight is that each side of the brain can be viewed as an individuals trying to persuade me what my next course of action will be.

The experiencing me: This is how I feel

The narrative me: This is how the me will feel about how I felt, and will  what I want to do in the future.

The two descriptions are lacking detail and probably wrong, but there is a point, I promise!

I haven’t exercised in the last two weeks. My body was tired, I had other things to think about, and I fell off my bike in my last race when I was doing well by my standards. No harm was done, by narrative was telling me that the effort isn’t worth it. It may be reporting that I feel worse than I actually did and do. Why bother?

There’s another narrative that tells me that I always need a rest several during the year, and I have a tendancy to come back. So that’s what I do. My press-ups start again. And once they are complete I can’t remember doing them. Of course, I know I have, but no memory of discomfort. It’s a little like eating tasty food, and then wondering where it went. And in the case of food, I can easily repeat the act, unless I’ve accepted that I’ve eaten and don’t need more. And luckily, I’ve trained my narrative that this is the best for me. In the same way, my fitness narrative has been trained, but it has more of an argument with my experiencing me.

In the case of today, I realised this and sat on my excercise bike for 20 minutes, whilst still listening to how I felt. It wasn’t much of an effort, but it was enough. After that, I did another fifty press-ups.

All of what I did was a compromise and keeps me healthy. I could push more and ignore how I feel, but that’s for athletes.

Finally, there was a parallel narative. And that was to write about it. Without doing the short bike session, I wouldn’t have written this.