Choices

I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Bird Rock, which is kind of between La Jolla and Pacific Beach.  It’s like a no-man’s land of beach and surf shops.  Reminds me a lot of Santa Cruz.  I’ve done this a couple times: end up somewhere in San Diego at a coffee shop, avoiding work, and basically just taking the day off to collect my thoughts.  Over the last few weeks I’ve had a pretty frustrating time at work, but for the most part, life is good.  Austin’s a great town.  I’m traveling on business right now in San Diego.  When I get back, I have a bunch of friends to visit and training to accomplish.  And then I realized…

My life is so scheduled, it’s amazing that I can even think without checking my calendar first.  Then I flashed back to a conversation over drinks at a dinner table with some coworkers and a customer last night… “why do you choose to do this to yourself?  what do you get out of it?”  That put a quote from Trainspotting into my head.

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

Ok so I don’t do heroin.  I swear.  Those marks around the veins on my arm?  That’s acne from shaving my arms and then proceeding to sit with them closed in some fashion all day long (which is officially over with… I will continue to manscape the arm region, but no more razors.  people stare at me like I have track marks.  it’s hilarious, kind of.).

Everyone has a drug of choice.  For some people, it’s booze, for others it’s stronger substances.  For me, it’s bourbon.  No, not really.  Well, maybe, but I digress.

My heroin is building stuff.  I sat in a conference room for 90 minutes watching a customer and several coworkers present a proof-of-concept of my software running on their systems.  It worked.  It took like an hour for me to integrate it.  Watching other people be successful with what I’ve built is a rush.  So that explains why the waking hours of my day are filled with often-annoying conference calls and trying meetings with frustrating processes.  But it doesn’t explain what I do before and after the “real job” — my other job.

What am I building when I’m training and teaching?  I’m building people.  They’re learning they can do so much more than they thought.  They’re getting stronger; they’re going to that first triathlon, running that first half marathon, or just getting out on a bike and cycling.  I’m building myself; confidence that I never had is emerging.  I can do stuff I never thought I could do.  Hell, at 6 AM I jumped onto a 27″ box 100 times and threw a 20lb med ball 50 times.

I want to build more.  It’s a rush that doesn’t compare to anything else, because it doesn’t happen immediately.  You have to work for it, and then when you have that epiphany — that moment where you can step back and survey what you’ve done so far — all you can see is your successes, built on all of the failures and shitty situations you overcame to get there.

Builders are inspiring to me.  Jeremy at CrossFit Central is changing Austin, one person at a time.  CJ at Invictus bailed from an arguably more lucrative job as an attorney to change lives in the way his life was changed.

I got my Crossfit Endurance cert to help my own training succeed in ways that we just don’t do in Austin right now.  I’m getting my Level 1 in the near future, because I want to share what I’ve built in myself with others; I also want to continue to refine and build within myself all I know I can be.

My heroin is building… what’s yours?