The Tao of No School Today

No School Today. Those three words are absolutely scintillating at any age. The glimmer of possibilities - the rush of excitement and ideas of how you might spend your new found time sparks animated pleasure at any age.  

Those feelings where echoed today from Virginia to Maine as the Eastern Seaboard was blanketed in a major blast of white. As I write this post I too am snowbound by impassable roads in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

This has me thinking about why we don’t feel this sense of possibility more often- like the feeling of opening night, every day. The clue here lies in the absence of activity - finding ways to not continually increase but decrease - to chisel away at the unessential.

In dealing with the unrelenting snowstorms of the VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, we now need to be supple and lean. We need to move faster and lighter. We need to learn to recognize and ride new forces well.

Learning to increase the essential by decreasing the nonessential is like building any other skill. It takes knowledge, practice and even some enlightenment. Think of it as a martial art. Like Jeet Kune Do.

The key to pushing new limits of endurance, speed, agility and power has as much to do with training the initiating muscles to undertake new loads as training the opposing breaking muscles to relax and decrease resistance.  The key is to minimize "antagonistic tension".  The cost of not doing so, extracts a high price for both the mind and body.  The result is early fatigue, wasted motion, and unnecessary tenseness in our excess effort. Essentially we are fighting ourselves, and the opponent with every move.

In the Age of Ideas we have before us a cornucopia of opportunities to create new value and enjoy phenomenal success as a result. To harness it will require rewiring your mind to see these new possibilities. This in turn requires turning off the old industrial reflexes and allowing a new pattern of neurophysiological adjustment to take place. 

As Bruce Lee wrote in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, “coordination is the quality which enables the individual to integrate all the powers and capacities of his whole organism into an effective doing of an act…muscles have no power to guide themselves, but the manner in which they act, and consequently the effectiveness of our performances, depends absolutely on how the nervous system guides them...learning coordination is a matter of training the nervous system and not a question of training muscle.”

So as the snow falls gently throughout the night, the question to consider is what can you decrease in your life to reduce costly physical and psychological drag and resistance?

Your answer holds the “qualities” to finding your maximum coordination.