Controlled discomfort
The following is an excerpt from my journal.
I just arrived home from my evening walk through the mountains. The sky is clouded. Combined with the fact that there is no moon at this stage, the night is as dark as it gets. Darkness in the wild engenders in me a mixture of peace and alertness. It is meditative, in the sense that I can more easily identify—and expound upon—concepts that are of immediate interest to me. My creativity benefits greatly, as I discover themes worth elucidating. Combined with the heightened sense of focus that remains active for a few hours, I am able to write at length and with regularity. I do it for myself. There never is a target audience. It is an expression of enthusiasm for something I enjoy.
Tomorrow is the 1st of October. Days get shorter with each passing day. Temperature levels are dropping too. They reach 25 degrees Celsius during the day and fall to around 12 degrees at night. I have for a few weeks now been experimenting with taking shirtless walks at this hour. The idea is to expose myself to the cold in order to test how I cope with it and to assess if this increased vulnerability has an impact on the aforementioned heightened focus I experience.
Topless nighttime hiking sounds insane, so I have to provide more context. First off, I do them at night because it is colder and I do not want to offend any potential passers by (even though it is quiet in the mountains). Secondly, this new practice is an extension of my long-established habit of bathing exclusively with cold water. I have been taking cold showers for more than five years now. The rationale is three-fold:
- A proxy for my overall health. Tolerance to cold seems to me like a decent quick check that I can carry out at home to figure out if some of my body’s subsystems are functioning properly. I remember when I would have a fever and would not tolerate even lukewarm water, so I assume that tolerance to cold is, ceteris paribus, a suggestion that I am okay (of course, this is but a single point of data).
- A real test of living with less. Hot water is the byproduct of some fairly advanced infrastructure. By learning to live without it, I make myself more economically resilient. This is not some theoretical advantage. I have been benefiting from this during the entirety of my project to live at the hut. Because I have not needed the setup of a boiler, with all its accompanying pipework, I have avoided a significant cost that would have otherwise imposed robust constraints on my plans. Whereas now I am living without it and can use my limited resources on more pressing issues (having hot water is nice, in case I ever have guests). Furthermore, this is a tangible sacrifice or, if we phrase it differently, a type of minimalism/austerity that you cannot treat lightly.
- An accountability structure. Cold showers are always mildly uncomfortable. Doing them is not for the faint of heart. This means that I make it harder for myself to not debase the standard I set for me. It gives me the motivation to try hard and it denies me of an convenient excuse/rationalisation where I allow myself the easy way out on the premise that I “will try harder tomorrow”. There is no “tomorrow” in such issues. Either I have the honesty towards myself to admit that I could not do it, or I try harder. The goal is to remain authentic. If I do it, it is because I can. If I do not do it, it is because I cannot. There never is an “I do not want” in this case.
Back to the night walks… I started taking off my shirt during August to ease myself into the process. I know from cold showers that I need to build the requisite capacity for this kind of exposure. Assuming all goes well, I will become even more tolerant to the cold outdoors as time goes by. But I will not write more before I do it first for, say, a full year: there is a high chance I cannot take it anymore and am forced to revert to my old ways.
The tricky part is the wind, which lowers the apparent temperature and increases the bite of the cold. Showers are easy and less intimidating by comparison because they take place in a room that is sheltered from the elements. This is why I cannot be confident and am experimenting with caution.
Not to imply that cold showers are easy. When I first bathed in cold water, I had a shocking initial experience: as soon as the water touched the most sensitive parts of the body (scalp, chest, and back) I instinctively took a deep breath and momentarily felt like time had paused at the point where innumerable tiny crystals were piercing through my skin. The locus was the upper body, as the limbs are more tolerant to cold. I found the courage to persevere by staying under the flowing water for a few more seconds. It was enough to overcome that pressure. I then felt in complete control. The whole experience was still intense in how it was vitalising every fibre of my being, but it would no longer trigger in me any sense of fear. As soon as I was done, I had an experience of confidence that is unlike those we normally get. It was visceral, rooted in the realisation that I could power through such an ordeal. Subsequent showers became easier, though remain relatively uncomfortable and have not lost their original sharpness.
The key is consistency. If I quit, say, for a month I will have trouble resuming the practice. The body has a propensity to find the easiest option, which is optimal when conserving energy, but can lead to laziness, with its longer-term downsides, if left unchecked.
What cold showers and this latest experiment of mine have in common is the creation of controlled discomfort. I am very careful with how I expose myself to danger. I do it in a way that does not put me at risk and am not dogmatic about it. If I sense that I am approaching the breaking point, I will quit. Furthermore, I am not doing any of this on a whimsy, nor to prove a point. It is part of a balanced lifestyle. I am careful with my diet and remain physically active throughout the day. This has been the norm for decades.
By bringing controlled discomfort upon myself, I try to remain sharp and capable. There is an obvious physical aspect to it, though its mental dimension is equally important. I must show the resolve to carry out the deed and I must maintain the discipline to stick to it for the long-term. The capacity for such fortitude is then available to me for all my other endeavours.
Comfort is wonderful, of course. What I value the most is peace, which is in large part why I live in the mountains. Though I understand that too much of it can make me more fragile, physically and mentally: I might take too many things for granted, may forget how difficult everything actually is, and not realise how dependant I have become on the pampers provided by my social milieu. This is my way of telling myself “remember your nature; remember who you are”, which allows me to contribute to civilisation what I think is essential and to not reinforce trends that take us too far in the direction of recklessness.