Ballad of a Thin Man: Worldview as Foundation
Jesus. You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand. You see somebody naked and you say, who is that man? You try so hard, but you don't understand just what you will say when you get home. That's the great Cat Power doing her cover, live cover actually of Ballad of a Thin Man by the great Bob Dylan.
Steve Sisson:And the title of this particular episode of the Running On Purpose podcast is Ballad of a Thin Man, Worldview as Foundation. For those of you who've been listening to me over the years, whether it was on the Running Rogue podcast or any of the various other long and short lived projects I've been working on. You know that a foundational element in my life and in my running practice but also in my coaching work is trying to figure out what's real. What is reality? This has been a question for me all of my life.
Steve Sisson:So you may be wondering what the relevance of Ballad of a Thin Man is to the theme of a worldview. And it comes in that last bit that she sings there that Bob wrote. Something's happening here that you don't understand. Do you, mister Jones? And certainly, this means that in the context that he wrote this song back in the late sixties with all of the upheaval and challenge that was going on, the youth rebelling, people changing worldviews, seeing the world in a very different way.
Steve Sisson:And he framed this as a takedown that mister Jones, whoever mister Jones might be, had no idea what he was talking about. He had no idea what he was how he saw the world, and he was lost. And Bob is saying, something's happening and you don't understand. What I'm hoping is this episode focuses you in on making sure that you do understand and while you may not have answers you may not have, a grounding to stand on that says absolutely unequivocally, we've got all the answers here. No, think that I covered this pretty deeply in this episode about it mostly being about questions and not answers.
Steve Sisson:But we still need to be able to operate effectively so that we can stand up under the withering critical statements that come at us about something happening that we don't understand. So I don't want you to be that thin man. I want you to be robust, resilient, deep, wide, expansive. And I think worldview is a way to do that. We have this tendency as young people to adopt the worldviews of our parents or point of view that our parents bring to us.
Steve Sisson:This is just natural and normal at those ages. How are we supposed to know differently? I do think there's some precocious young people who immediately know that whatever milieu they're in is not right for them. But I didn't. I grew up in a strict fundamentalist Christian background.
Steve Sisson:And for me, it was a was a safe place. I had a loving mother and a loving father, an incredible community that I could count on. But sometime around my leaving of college, leaving high school and going into college, I really began to question how I saw reality and how I saw the world. And you may be saying, Why in the world are you talking about this? I've heard you talk about this a 100 times if I've heard you talk about it once.
Steve Sisson:It's because with where we're at right now with this podcast, this second season of the Running On Purpose podcast, I'm trying to hit some foundational things. And for me, this is the most important foundation. How do you see reality? It's really all about the big questions. Who am I?
Steve Sisson:Where did I come from? Where am I going? How is this world even here? How does it function? And for some of you, you may not have asked these big questions.
Steve Sisson:Big questions may not be part of your, modus operandi, how you operate in the world. But one of the basic foundations of this episode and of the way I work with athletes is that it's my view that when you get into tough times, when you get into really big existential challenges, when you start to ask, How do I get through this? How find do the kind of power? Where do I get power from? Where do I get heart from?
Steve Sisson:Where do I get purpose from? These questions, at least for me, they've always shown up in really challenging and difficult situations. Starting line experiences for me throughout my whole life have been really existentially challenging and bring me back to a worldview or make me question the worldview I'm in. You know, I mentioned I started really struggling with worldview when I was in high school and going into college, but I think it probably started well before then. Maybe I related this recently in a Keep Going podcast, I think, around my discovery of Santa Claus.
Steve Sisson:Here we are going into the Christmas season and I heard someone reflect earlier on how their son, this past weekend, over Thanksgiving break, he's I think in fourth grade, how he they had to tell him that Santa Claus wasn't real. And that moment when I had that conversation with my father on It was on Berryhill Drive. I think I was eight or nine years old. Maybe I was as old as 10. I was the first born so I got to get told a little later I think.
Steve Sisson:But when my dad told me that Santa Claus wasn't real, I also I think I asked him about it. It immediately I I I extended the concept of Santa Claus to God. I think from that moment, I always was questioning, are we seeking? Are we trying to find out? And it and it really pushed this desire for a felt sense, for an experience of God.
Steve Sisson:And so my questions around reality, what is real, started from a young age and they've never stopped. Here I am at 54 years old and I'm still Though I feel much more comfortable with my personal worldview. I I see, highlighting this as an essential part of a running experience that needs to be explored, concretized in a way. When I say concretized, I want to make sure I'm clear here that it's concretized for a moment but then it becomes fluid again. But it's essential to have, in my opinion, it's essential to have these kinds of knowings about what's going on so you can categorize the voluntary suffering that you're putting yourself through on race day or in training.
Steve Sisson:Seems to be we're much better at the voluntariness of suffering. We recognize it's voluntariness when we're in training but having just gone through an entire cycle of, you know, a month and a half, two months of consistent racing experiences with my athletes. It's really hard for people in the moment, in the pain and suffering to see it as voluntary. And because that sort of existential confusion or difficulty shows up as you start grasping for the why, why am I feeling this pain? Where am I at?
Steve Sisson:Do I want to continue this? Why did this happen to me? I argue that having a strong, understood, flexible, yes, but also powerful worldview, one that can feed you and sustain the kinds of struggles and challenges and experiences that we have when we do hard things. I think it comes from exploring this idea of worldview. So that's what I wanna do today.
Steve Sisson:Now, I'm also releasing at the same time an episode that I cut with my soul brother and run brother, Jason Brooks, back in the 2022. So eighteen months ago. We did a short lived podcast called The Arete Podcast. It was under Rundgosis when I was doing that project. And this was our second episode and it was our first real deep conversational one.
Steve Sisson:And so I'm releasing that at the same time as a re release so that you can get a little bit of contextual discussion around two people kind of working through this idea. And, my points of view on it are predictable and probably unsurprising. But I really wanna highlight Jason's, what he brings to bear on this topic. It really, I think, informed my thinking on creating this podcast, this particular episode, especially his ideas around, his three basic points around what he thinks are essential to be thinking about from a worldview perspective that I'll be sharing in just a little bit. So I just wanted to release the whole episode.
Steve Sisson:I thought it would be useful and fruitful. For those of you who have been following me with this Running On Purpose podcast or the Keep Going podcast and you're looking for, sometimes people ask me, I want to hear more from you. Well, I have a few others there on that, Arete, podcast that are good. I may re release some of those, it just depends. But this one was relevant to what we were discussing here.
Steve Sisson:And again, like I say in the intro to that rerelease that I'm hoping to coax my brother, Jason, into more conversations. We've got a series on Warriors that we've been talking about doing for a long time that would revisit the concept I was unpacking with Chris McClung on the Running Rogue podcast way back, way, way back. So, anyway, more on that in the future. But for now, what I wanna do is just give you, again, like I did in the discussion under movement practice, kind of a central thesis or an argument for why I think having a worldview or being clear on worldview is very important for a distance runner. So maybe we can start right away with what's worldview.
Steve Sisson:When I was learning initially about worldview, it was as I was studying theology at the same time that I was going to the University of Texas in 1988. I started I was a part of a church group, a church Christ group, and they had a theologies institute attached to a church there that was right near the school. I So started taking courses there and man, they got into the rudiments, they got down to the basic philosophical principles around how we operate and how we create theology, how we create a vision of God, you know, it's the study of Theos. And in that, they discussed a term, a German word, which means way of seeing the world, worldview. And that, the moment I heard that term, I knew that it was something that really resonated with me and that was kind of like finding a word in another language that has mystery wrapped around it, like a present you could unpack.
Steve Sisson:But in German, it's really hard to do that and then when you think about it from a, you know, we were studying Greek at the time and trying to break these things down, it was overwhelming for me. At the same time, I'm trying to be a competitive distance at a pretty high level. I went to the NCAA Championships that first semester, and competed all through those years. But I was also trying to study history and be a good student, and at the time, I was more of an athlete student than a student athlete, as I will admit, but I was serious about learning and thinking. And here were things that really resonated with me because they were core principles, core values, the deep stuff, the big questions.
Steve Sisson:So what is a worldview? A worldview basically is a kind of a philosophicaltheological word or concept around how you view reality. Ontology is a philosophical term for study of being which can sometimes be of corralled into this area or there's epistemology which is the study of knowing, how But a worldview basically takes these metaphysical principles, both ontology and epistemology and there's other categories within of bigger category. But it's taking these metaphysical big picture views and bringing them into your life or using them as a grounding for your life. Now in this episode with Jason that you'll have an opportunity to revisit, I talk about pushing off the bottom of a pool.
Steve Sisson:For some reason, this has always been a core and key image for me probably because I learned to swim by my father throwing me into the deep end of a pool or not really deep end, think he threw me just into a pool. I was pretty young, you know, five, six years old. Threw me into a pool and said swim. Now he was there to see me but I remember sinking down to the bottom of the pool, finding a grounding there and pushing off and because of that felt experience, because of that lived phenomenological deep experience of fear and dread of dying and then finding ground and pushing off of it and coming up and getting oxygen in air, that release, that openness, it's always given me this idea of pushing off the bottom of a pool. But I find with my work with athletes, sometimes it's better to talk about the ground, your place that you're standing.
Steve Sisson:Now view obviously utilizes the perceptual element of vision, the sense of vision that we see. And I do think this is really important because for so many of us, our primary sense is our sense of vision. We use it so We privilege it in such a significant way. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying it's the way we are. We we really do view most of our human experience through vision.
Steve Sisson:Of course, if we lost our taste or we lost our touch or we lost our eyesight, I mean, we lost our hearing, if we, you know, couldn't walk appropriately or had other challenges or other other tragedies happen to us, we would have a very hard time being able to operate in the world. But I do think for the vast majority of us, our largest fear would be Excuse me. Our largest fear. I do think for the vast majority of all of us that our greatest fear would be not seeing, becoming blind. So I think worldview could be viewed, if you will, as sort of how you see and I'll use sometimes with working with athletes.
Steve Sisson:Let's make sure we see this situation clearly and when I say I wanna make sure we see this situation clearly, I'm referring to this worldview, that this vision of seeing it in a way that's aligned with how you already translate the huge perceptual overload of all the information that we get from our sensory experience in the world. But grounding probably will be a more useful analogy or reference, metaphor, I'm not sure which one it is, for what I'm talking about here. Because in the future I'm gonna be talking more about speed economy or biomechanics and the foundations and fundamentals of running form and the place we operate from is a relation to the ground. And so I view, I think it might be very helpful to be framing this conversation around grounding as much as I ground it in the view. So it's up to you.
Steve Sisson:You can see it either way. It doesn't really matter. What's crucial is that you understand that a worldview is a non negotiable. You may be saying, Well, I've never heard of it until now, so how could it be a non negotiable? Because you're actually functioning every minute of the day.
Steve Sisson:Are you believing in your sleep around a concept of a worldview? We as humans are pattern makers and in order to make a pattern, we need a template. So in our early upbringing, as I discussed before, our parents created template for us and we followed that template through our early years. At some point in time, we take that template and we start using it to make our own unique patterns. Think about this in fashion.
Steve Sisson:A particular form for a dress is then manipulated and twisted to give it some kind of uniqueness for the new designer who wants to take the basic concept and then change it and adjust it and adapt it. But typically, it's going to operate primarily under the auspices and the functions of address. The template will be address template but the way that template is pattern played out in the world through the actual physical look, feel and experience of a dress is unique to the vision of that designer. And as we grow up, we begin to make our own designs and we make our own, we begin to do patterns in such a way that our template shifts and changes. Now occasionally, we have a rupture.
Steve Sisson:We have something come in that's incredibly traumatic or challenging that will upset our worldview. For me, this didn't happen until I was 17 or 18 years old and went on to college and I learned about Worldview and then I lost my faith and then lots of other things happened. For others, it will be the loss of a parent or a brother or a sister or a traumatic physical or sexual trauma, abuse that happens in our world. But rarely do we get through to our early thirties before we're we've we've significantly altered the template of our view. And I argue that you won't get your ass out of bed in the morning if you don't have a clear, cohesive, aligned worldview with the way that you operate, whether it's working for you well or it's working for you poorly.
Steve Sisson:So someone who disagrees with me and says maybe worldview isn't a real thing because they're a pessimist or they're depressed or they're having a really rough time in their life. Something's gonna eventually get them out of bed. Eventually. The vast majority of people that are listening to this podcast get out of bed on a consistent basis. So our worldview is what is it that's in that's at the deepest level getting you out of bed?
Steve Sisson:Because bed is very comfortable for most of us. It's a It's such like the experience of the womb. Of course, I don't remember my experience of the womb, but I can consider it and think about it. And very frequently, especially as we get into the winter months, it does get harder and harder, especially for us who are getting up super early to go exercise. It's hard to get out of bed.
Steve Sisson:We have to have a reason. We have to have a purpose for getting out of bed. So I argue that anybody who needs to get out of bed has a worldview. Now maybe that worldview isn't metaphysically deep, but it's still a worldview. So another way to kind of think about this is a worldview is focused on big questions.
Steve Sisson:So some of those big questions might be: What is reality? What would you die for? What would you defend to the death? How does the world operate? How Why does the sun come up and the sunset?
Steve Sisson:Why is there beauty? Why are we even here? The likelihood, the chance that life would exist on this planet, on any planet, this statistically is highly improbable. So how do you deal with that? How do you see that?
Steve Sisson:So where are we going? What happens when we die? What will happen at death? What do you believe in that? How do you act in the world?
Steve Sisson:That's an ethical question but those ethics are based on a worldview. What are your values? Politically? How do you think politically? When you see someone do something right or wrong and you believe that something is right or wrong, you're operating from a world view.
Steve Sisson:So this I argue is foundational and fundamental to the absolutely to being a human being. But why is it important? Well because it's so foundational and so grounding in how we operate and function. It's good to be clear about it. And I think that so much what many of the challenges that we have currently seeing in our world, especially from a depressive, from the point of view of mental health, come from a lack of coherent and aligned worldview positioning that a person's day to day life does not line up with what they think reality is or they have such a pessimistic view of reality that it's very hard for them to see any reason whatsoever to get out of bed.
Steve Sisson:So again, I think that thinking and considering worldview is really, really important, and that's why I wanted to dedicate, one episode of this season of Running On Purpose, and also to bring out, that conversation that I have with Jason, which I would love for you to listen to. So let's think about this a little bit more. I want to unpack this a little bit. One of the things I'm talking about, I think that is really important for any training that anyone's gonna do or racing that anyone's gonna do is for them to have a sense and a feeling of alignment or cohesion that you feel like who you are, who you say you are, what you want, what you believe and how you operate and act is aligned with how you view reality. That you're cohesive, that what you say to one person is relatively consistent with what you say to another person.
Steve Sisson:Now there may be subtle nuances here, places where we are fluid and flexible in how we operate given the context of whatever situation we find ourselves in. But for the vast majority of us, we're gonna be much higher functioning and feel much better and more, cohesive and clear with how we're operating and regulating ourselves in day to day life if we have this level of alignment and cohesion. And I argue that that level of alignment and cohesion is essential and it has to come from a worldview. You can think about this physiologic as well. The idea of our nervous system is that we've got this whole entire system operating and trying to operate below the hood, underneath the hood, below our conscious awareness in a way that is cohesive and consistent.
Steve Sisson:But we have to guide it somehow. It'll take care. The breathing will happen, but we know that when we get into difficult challenging circumstances, sometimes our breathing gets upset. If you get nervous about a thing, you'll recognize yourself constricting and tightening up and starting to conserve. Your nervous system is regulating, and however, if you think that anything that could to get you could kill you and destroy you and that that end is the end is the end, then you may have a harder time dealing with it.
Steve Sisson:However, if someone has a view that when I die, something else will happen, maybe they don't have that same experience. Now I doubt that. I think that there are core evolutionary aspects to being human that, transcend No, no. Let's say not transcend, that's the wrong term. That are the basis of how we experience the world and what we do.
Steve Sisson:So you know, this is the argument against free will for many people that especially someone like say Sam Harris who views that, hey, science is basically showing us that we are already operating purely and simply off of our animalistic instinctual behaviors. Robert Sapolsky just wrote a book about this topic. And, I think that they argue that we don't really have free will. We have the illusion of free will, but underneath it, we're all autonomically being designed already. Things are operating and happening.
Steve Sisson:But then that bears the question of why did the idea or concept of free will or the concept of a god ever come out in the first place? Why would that occur? Well, occurs because we need continuity, consistency, and alignment in order for us to feel clearly focused and purposeful. We need to have meaning and in order to have meaning, we have to believe that something matters. In order to believe that something matters, we have to have a viewpoint from which we stand, a place that we say that we're grounded, where we're like, This is me.
Steve Sisson:Now much of the spiritual practice, many people's spiritual practice, can be working towards deconstructing that illusion of self and those other things. I'm not gonna leave that alone. That's not the topic for our conversation right now. We're not gonna argue whether or not worldview is essential from a physiologicalbiological point of view. We're gonna look at it much more from a performance standpoint.
Steve Sisson:What happens on race day? What happens in training? And I argue that a clearly understood, articulated, and reinforced worldview provides the primary place from which to operate as an athlete. It also makes for great parenting, it makes for great relational grounding for any deep, meaningful, romantic, or work related relationship that you might have, knowing where you're standing and where you're coming from, where your values are, where your edges are, what you'll fight for and what you'll allow to let go. These are all grounded in this idea of a worldview.
Steve Sisson:Then you may say, you kidding me? No, no, no. I would love for you to send me some arguments where you think that this is not true. I'd love to hear them. Now, will I be open to them?
Steve Sisson:I promise you I'll be open to them. I just don't necessarily think that I'll agree. So, again, we're gonna go back to the idea of alignment, cohesion, and nervous system regulation. Now, one of the ways I like to think about this, give you some little advice on this idea, is that sometimes it can be helpful if the feeling of having a worldview is overwhelming. Like, okay, but how do I sort of ground everything and all things in my deepest being?
Steve Sisson:Like, what? What? One way to think about this is to kind of consider three potential intelligence centers that a human being might have. Now, these have a deep history, a deep history in perennial studies or studies of the sort of the things in religious traditions that hold true across the religious traditions. These are intelligence centers.
Steve Sisson:The first is the intelligence center of the brain, which is rationality, thinking using the intelligence of the brain. Recognize, this is how most of us operate. When I talk about mental training, we're talking about what's going on training mostly what's going on rational context. But I'd argue that there's two other intelligence centers. Another one is your heart center.
Steve Sisson:This is absolutely unequivocally a place where we operate from on occasion. You'll say, I love a person or I feel them. My heart goes out to them. That space, if you spend little time operating intelligently from that location, does create a much more regulated and consistent and coherent nervous system just sitting in your heart space prior to out or prior to a race can be really instructive in recognizing how intelligent our heart is. I heard something recently talk about how the resonance of the heartbeat can be sensed and felt three feet outside of a human body.
Steve Sisson:Now, you might say, yes, but that's not using cognitive processes. Yeah, but we're using it as a place from which to make decisions, a place from which to see the world, to experience the world. I think most of you will agree that there's some wisdom to that. There's some felt sense experience that you have of using your heart as a way of thinking, of being intelligent. The third area, is the gut.
Steve Sisson:Now, in the Eastern tradition, sometimes this is called the Dan Tien or the Hara in Japanese. Dan tian is Chinese, hara is Japanese. It's largely the movement center, the instinctual center, the place we operate, without thinking, But many of us will talk about having a gut sense. I had a gut feel I should move out of that room or get out of that location. Or that person, I don't feel good about that person.
Steve Sisson:There's something about them. That might be a heart intelligence or intelligence. These intelligences are incredibly useful and helpful for navigating effectively in the world, and I argue that they're a part of our worldview. They're a part of how we The gut being more instinctual, you might call that, I don't want to be hierarchical because I don't want you to think of these things as higher and lower, but just coming from a place that's older in us, that might even be evolutionarily linked to our more reptilian or more instinctual animalistic center. And then the heart center might be something that makes us a little more uniquely human although we do think we see heart related intelligences in other species, but it seems to be something that's much more human.
Steve Sisson:And then finally, this conscious rational aspect seems to be principally unique in humans, and now what we're also experiencing is this entire explosion of the artificial intelligence that's happening. Now, intelligence is primarily on ones and zeros operating through the avenue of the mental realm, the brain realm, the mind realm. I'm not saying good or bad about that, but one of the things I think that will save most of humanity from many of the ills and challenges that are so feared through AI and how AI operates is by grounding ourselves in a view, a worldview that uses intelligence as the mind head intelligence as an important place to operate, but also balancing that with a heart and gut intelligence that we can uniquely do as humans to put all three of those into play. So I just wanted to bring that forward as a way of considering worldview as three intelligence centers. This is something that I'll cover in the future, especially, this will be in probably in the spring, we'll talk a little bit more about this.
Steve Sisson:But I wanted to pull forward a couple of points before I go into a particular reality test that I'd like to share with you around the importance of Worldview and how Worldview operates. I wanted to pull through a few of Jason's key points that he makes in the episode that we talk about that's, gonna be released at the same time as this one. He states three things that I really want to bring forward that are really, really important. The first is, I've mentioned this already, but that one of the important things about worldview is that everyone has one. That we can't operate without it.
Steve Sisson:I've already unpacked that pretty deeply. But he says another thing that I think is really important. His point two is that everyone's worldview is unique. I think this is really instructive and helpful for those of you who might be feeling the residual pull of some religious or doctrinaire or dogmatic aspect to a worldview that maybe it's trying to control you in a way that is outside of your control. And I think Jason's point is really well made that if we consider that what we're doing is taking a view, a pattern, we're taking a template and building our own patterns, eventually that template changes and it becomes unique to us.
Steve Sisson:It becomes our own template. And that template will change as we want to put on different clothing, create different designs and different kinds of ways of being. But that it's unique and you view it as unique. That a worldview is something that is seen through or experienced through your body. It's a conceptual arrangement.
Steve Sisson:It's an idea that you use to operate in the world. And as such, because you'll be using it to operate in the world, you will have a unique view of it. And anyone who has similar worldviews to other people, very often when they talk, they get deep into discussion. They'll begin to see the diversity, the difference between even relatively dogmatic and hard held core beliefs, fundamental beliefs around it, that there's always a nuance, individual nuance, from each person based on their unique experience of living through life, the things they see, how they relate to other human beings, how they relate to the nature, how they relate to their own sexuality, their sexual identity, how they relate to others, how they relate to other tribes or peoples. All these different things have a way of impacting our view and our view, the place we come from, is an amalgamation, a developed template for future patterns that we're going to create through our lives.
Steve Sisson:So I think you can see why I think this is so important. And finally, brings out the point, his third point, is that worldviews evolve. This is something that I kind already introduced through the idea of a template. But that that will change. And it should change.
Steve Sisson:Now sometimes those changes that I discussed, they can be really traumatic and really hard. They come in like a thief in the night. They come bowling over us like lightning bolt that strikes us and makes us just completely shift and change. And of course that initial lightning bolt creates a trauma where we freeze, where our nervous system gets engaged and we flee, we fight, we freeze, or we fun. And there'll be a period in that evolution where that kind of happens, where we might not be able to stand grounded.
Steve Sisson:But eventually I argue that if you're healthy, you can allow those worldviews to evolve and that actually being a functioning human in the world effectively is allowing your worldview to evolve. Something I'll unpack in the future around soul making. So those three things he said. There were other two things he said. I think those were kind of his three fundamentals, but he also had a couple other areas that he unpacked I wanted to talk about, just in case you don't listen to that episode.
Steve Sisson:One is that there are no answers, only questions. I love this. This is a way that I think I struggle with a lot. I struggle for answers. I want to know why a thing happened.
Steve Sisson:I want to know why an athlete's performance wasn't as good as I thought it was. Why is the sun coming up? Why does the sun go down? Why does my dog act in a way? Why does my daughter acting in a certain way?
Steve Sisson:Why do I act in a certain way? Why do I get sick? And when I do that, I'm not saying, Oh, I'm just so curious about questions. I just want to revel in the questions. No, I'm looking for an answer.
Steve Sisson:Why do I need an answer? Because I want to begin to start to create a pattern. The answers allow us to hook onto, to ground. But one of the most important parts about a worldview is to recognize that there aren't really going to be answers. There's just going to be questions.
Steve Sisson:And while you may use an answer temporarily, you'd be wary of that answer being dogmatically held. He also highlights values. He talks about values a lot. Jason does. And, I'm a big believer in values.
Steve Sisson:I like to think of them sometimes as as first principles, if you will. But your first principles are gonna be based on your on your worldview, how you see the thing. And finally, he highlights mystery, unknowing, not knowing. Anybody that's been listening to me recently knows that this is something that I hold as very, very important. Recognizing uncertainty as the fundamental reality that's going on around us change.
Steve Sisson:Change is happening and because there's change, we can't be certain of a thing. Worldview is important because it allows us to stand our ground and to hold our own space, our sovereignty, even temporarily in the face of mystery. And this is why I think Worldview can be so helpful in starting line experiences and middle of races. Because if you have a place from which you're standing that you feel confident in, that you feel like you can hold your ground, then even when the winds of change blow in, even when uncertainty throws at you, you've got something you can hold onto. Now I believe that that needs to be loosely held.
Steve Sisson:If you hold on too strong, too groundedly, then you're gonna, you may end up getting untethered, you may get uprooted from the place that you're standing. So having the ability to keep that grounding as a principle, a place inside you. We are talking about conceptual things here. Frequently I think we get confused that concepts are reality, that concepts are things. No, they're just the way that we pattern and communicate about things.
Steve Sisson:They're just useful categories within which we can use to order our world to try to make some sense of what's going on. Mystery is, in my opinion, one of the core aspects of being human and recognition and dance with mystery is one of the great skills that any human being can adopt and become conversant and flexible with. I will admit that this is one of my life paths. One of the things I work on consistently. Each week I check-in with how am I doing with mystery?
Steve Sisson:How am I doing with the unknown? How am I doing with the fact that I'm in a river and it's flowing and I have no idea what's coming up, but all I can do is be prepared the best I can for what might approach? It's a really important viewpoint, a really important way of seeing the world. And I unpacked that in that episode with Jason. Talked a little bit more about that.
Steve Sisson:So let's get a little more practical here. So what I want you to do as an exercise is I want you to select a worldview that's very different from your own. Especially one that you might consider ridiculous, or view as patently false or that gives you the heebie jeebies or raises the hairs on the back of your neck. Pick something that's viscerally challenging for you. Now if you take on this challenge of this exercise, you need to do it in the spirit of exploration.
Steve Sisson:Again, there are no answers, only questions. So what we're doing here is questioning whether or not you believe a worldview is important or what a worldview is or how a worldview operates in real time. And this exercise is one in which I'm going to ask you to take on the costume or the experience of another worldview for basically one to fifteen minutes a day for seven days. So that's the ask. For seven days, I want you to think on or run with, contemplate, meditate on, in free time, maybe as you go to bed or after you wake up, maybe if you're sitting in line at a grocery store, maybe if you're in the car waiting, or if you're not, instead of listening to this podcast, pausing it, or after you listen to this podcast, trying it, but just for a little window of time, you know?
Steve Sisson:And I like to say one to fifteen minutes because I don't want you to feel like fifteen minutes is the expectation. Even just sitting with this and just wrapping your mind around it and saying, I'm gonna take on a worldview of somebody different than mine, and I'm just gonna hold onto it for a minute. And then if you feel safe enough and are inspired enough to try to see how wearing somebody else's worldview would be, because it's very instructive, I highly recommend it, you might take this on for a little longer or you might try on multiple worldviews. Okay, so for a few minutes, I want you to, a minute to fifteen minutes, I want you to walk in the shoes of a different worldview or better, put on the costume of that worldview. And then I want you to just think about it.
Steve Sisson:Maybe you could ask yourself, what kinds of choices would I make that are different than the choices I make on a day to day basis around a particular topic? If I had this worldview different from your own, how would I approach this run? How would I approach this challenge at work? How would I approach this conflict with my child or my partner? How would I relate to this stranger that I don't know from a perspective that's not my standard template, not my standard pattern, not the same way that I operate on a day to day basis?
Steve Sisson:Try it. Do it for seven days. You want to explore what the world looks like, how it smells, what unique items are a part of the worldview that you can take on. Again, it's like putting on a costume. So after three to four days, if you get to that point, three to four days in of this exploration, what I want you to do is to shift outside of your thinking about it and considering what a person would think as an observer, but instead to embody it, to truly walk in that view.
Steve Sisson:So what that means is that I want you to feel inside of what that point of view would be. And it's really helpful to do this project. This is a great imaginal process. You use your imagination to think through. And when you use your imagination, you're not reaching up into your mind, okay?
Steve Sisson:What you're doing is just letting go of your current worldview. You've practiced three or four days of kind of envisioning the idea of what a worldview different from yours might be, and then you, by that time, three to four days in, if you're still working with this project, you can then sense into what it would feel like to feel that worldview. See what happens. This that I'm asking you to do, eventually I'll be talking a lot more about it. It's an imaginal practice.
Steve Sisson:I'm not going to unpack that right now, but it's beyond imagination. Think about if you have a child or as you were a child, this trope, this thing I'm going to bring up is something everyone knows in our society. They've seen it or experienced themselves one way or another. But I experience it on a day to day basis because I have a seven year old in my life. But my stepdaughter, she acts as if she plays with her dolls, with anything at hand, and begins to have conversations with them.
Steve Sisson:She's taking on the view of that doll or that character, of that lovey, of that stuffed animal. And it's real, and she's feeling the feels. She's sensing the senses, feeling the feels. That's what I'm asking you to do. So you may say, Why?
Steve Sisson:Well, I'll unpack why you do the imaginal work later, okay, in another episode. But why do this from a worldview perspective? Why am I asking you to take on this project? Because I argue that number one, you will unequivocally and undoubtedly recognize that worldview is the thing. Because when you take on for five, six, seven days the worldview of another person, you will distinctly recognize your difference.
Steve Sisson:Now hopefully, that difference will also bring in some empathy, some allowance. This is why we talk about walking a mile in someone else's shoes, that cliche. Underneath that cliche is a deep, deep truth. A physical truth, an existential truth, a spiritual truth, psychological truth, truth at all levels. And with empathy and allowance, grace typically develops.
Steve Sisson:Suddenly your worldview strengthens because you feel the commitment and understanding of difference but a grace and allowance and empathy for another point of view unfolds. You can see how this could be really, really helpful in our modern world. But I think it also can show you that when you're struggling at the 30 ks to 35 ks mark of a race, when you're dealing with cramping, when you're wondering, Why in the world am I doing this? Or, I thought I was gonna be in a different place than I am right now. Why do I have to suffer in the ways that I have to suffer?
Steve Sisson:Why does this have to happen? Why is this happening to me? Why? Why? Why?
Steve Sisson:Those questions of why are purpose questions. These are worldview questions. And those who have a strong worldview, we don't stop asking the question why. But the why just reinforces and brings us back to the power and the depth, to the alignment and cohesion, to the aliveness and active sense of being truly here, truly present, truly alive. And I can't see how that doesn't benefit our running.
Steve Sisson:Now my initial argument was, hey, you need to think about worldview in order to be able to operate effectively and functionally. That's sort of a negative lack of precision, what you don't have and what you need to do. And what I'm ending with here now is instead a positive, proactive, alive, full experience. Now these questions need a little bit of a caveat, a little bit of a Surgeon General's warning. Seeking and questioning worldview can be very, very challenging.
Steve Sisson:The term existential dread comes to mind. And you may need to do this, with a psychotherapist, with a spiritual guide, with a pastor, or a friend, a partner, you may need support. And if you feel a deep sense of disease, I highly recommend you find that support. Because once you open up this door, this portal, that level of existence will always be present. At least it has been in my experience and with most people that I work with, that door is very hard to close.
Steve Sisson:You might be able close it for an instant, but just like in a horror film, that monster comes out. Now that monster is you. That monster is your pattern, the pattern you've made based on the template that you've inherited and that you've developed. And you can create your own worldview. And I argue you are responsible for your own worldview.
Steve Sisson:So I hope that's helpful. I may do an additional or an adjusted aspect to this. There's two other areas that I'd like to unpack with Worldview. Right now, I'm not, I feel like we've already gone almost fifty three minutes on this topic. But I would like to eventually unpack four Worldviews, four specific Worldviews, and use them as an example for those might function.
Steve Sisson:And then also, I think I might discuss the idea of the shadow of worldviews, that there's an aspect of deeply challenging and deeply difficult that while they can produce meaning, they can also produce pain, suffering, tyranny, fundamentalism, fanaticism, those kinds of things. I hope you found this useful. These are the episodes that move me the most. These are the episodes I feel so called, is the right word, called to put out to the world. I hope you enjoy it.
Steve Sisson:If not, there's lots of other stuff for you to listen to. If so, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you thought of this episode. You can send me an email, sisson, s I s s o n, telos, t e L O S, Running R U N N I N G dot com. I'd love to hear from you.
Steve Sisson:If you loved it or you hated it, sometimes it feels like I'm just screaming into the void. Even if it is, still feels necessary and essential. Thanks to you for listening and Godspeed my friends. Godspeed.
