Mental Agility

How do you score?

People are freaking out because their world-view is being challenged, and they allow themselves to feel overwhelmed by that experience.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Real and meaningful dialogue has become rare lately, because so many people have lost the mental agility to stay open to multi-dimensional truths, and they have shut down the natural flow of curiosity and wonder. A sincere exploration of the whole becomes impossible under these circumstances, and people prefer to latch onto quick presumptive ‘answers,’ for the illusion of certainty or moral high ground. People have become afraid, and I believe the true origin of this fear is the primal instinct to protect our sense of belonging to a group (or a tribe). In modern society, if you dare to be open to ideas - or even facts - that seriously contradict the predominant positions held by your group, where will that lead?

My experience has been that my questioning, my wondering, my curiosity led me long ago to challenge the status quo in a great many places, and I did experience the internal pain of feeling distanced or separated from the groups I had associated with - my family, my high-school friends, my college friends, and surprisingly even many of my ‘spiritual’ and ‘healer’ friends. This evolving journey of questioning has not been for the faint of heart! I had no choice though, as I was unable to find peace in ‘going along to get along,’ when my mind or my body was telling me that something was no longer making sense to me.

One way or another, new facts and experiences were presented that caused me to see things from new and different angles. I didn’t feel afraid of this - just compelled. In a funny way I am like a beagle, persistent in following a new scent to its origin. I have often wondered why most people, it seems to me, are not so much like this. And I think the answer may lie somewhere between personality and that subconscious primal fear of becoming ostracized from their groups.

“A sign of intellect is the ability to change your mind in the face of new facts. A mark of wisdom is refusing to let the fear of admitting you were wrong stop you from getting it right. The joy of learning something new eventually exceeds the pain of unlearning something old.” - Adam Grant

Trusting your own path, sometimes seemingly alone for a time, definitely requires an extra dose of both courage and faith. From my vantage point however, ignoring my intuition, or pretending not to see what I see or feel what I feel, is a much more painful choice. What excites me more recently, is my growing agility around making peace with often not knowing - what the outcome will be, what the “right” solution or decision might be, or even what would be best for me.

Simple PRESENCE is what brings me peace, and when I am consciously choosing this peaceful presence, my mental agility score immediately rises exponentially. Presence with what I am feeling and sensing in the moment; presence with my belongingness to Source, to Nature, to Life; presence with the life around me; and presence with my inner guidance system. When I am present, I am grounded and open to the reality of the moment, and I am not anxious or worried, I am not making assumptions or predictions, and I am not trying to control reality. When I am present, I am able to feel the true vibrational quality of the moment, and I am able to respond to it without the reactivity that derives from our attachment to our imagined mental stories. When I am present, if there is true danger in the moment, I will know this and be able to respond wisely.

Many things have tested my mental agility in the last couple of weeks, as the timeline draws near for my transition from Florida to Michigan. I suppose it’s inevitable that a cross-country move brings multiple challenges! Simultaneously taking on a project to convert a van into a temporary living space has added a huge new learning curve, and an extra layer of complexity (and fun!) to this transitional time period.

It has been helpful to preserve my daily personal grounding practices during this time of super-extra-busyness. Even if they sometimes have to be shortened, I don’t let this temporary busyness consume me - it’s essential to maintain my connection to that peaceful presence I described earlier. That connection helps me notice, and pause to celebrate each one of the many amazing synchronicities and good fortunes that have revealed themselves in this transition time. Then, when a new obstacle arises, I am not knocked over (at least not for long, haha!).

I am blessed have a team-mate in at least the Florida side of this moving and van-building process - a longtime friend who is a genius with technical matters, and who can always eventually find a reasonable, logical work-around for most technical obstacles that arise. We are both primarily fruitarians, and I know that really helps us to keep our cool! It also affords us the ability to stay the course with steady energy and wellness, and a positive attitude. We take breaks together most days, usually to enjoy a big bowl of frozen banana “ice cream” on the porch (it’s hot in May in southern Florida!). My friend’s habit of changing out of his “work clothes” and into his “eating clothes” always makes me laugh, but in all seriousness it’s a declaration of a pause, and a shifting of gears….a demarcation of a well-deserved rest-break.

With my coaching clients, I often talk about the little actions we can take frequently throughout each day to “short-circuit” the buildup of stress and tension. The things that attack and destroy our natural mental agility are stress, tension, exhaustion, attachments, presumptions, assumptions, contraction, fear, unbridled emotion and the imaginative stories that loop through an undisciplined mind, vying for our attention.

Probably the biggest set-back we faced was when the large, expensive power bank that we had installed in the back of the van to power all the appliances in my little home-on-wheels (a little fridge, the ceiling fans, laptop and phone, lights, etc.) self-destructed in the final 10 days before my launch-time. That was certainly very heavy news, and for at least a couple of hours I felt a foreboding sense of dis-belief - like the unthinkable had just actually happened - and my chest was constricted in an uncomfortable way.

We fussed around with all possibilities for getting some aspect of the power bank working again, but finally we had to surrender. It was truly inoperable. That was a dark moment of facing a hard reality. Making matters worse, it appeared to be out of warrantee. The next day, I contacted the manufacturer to let them know it was defective, and to my surprise they said it WAS still under some sort of warrantee, and they offered to either repair it or replace it with a refurbished one. Good news! But the unfortunate timing of its demise meant that I would not receive the working one until after my arrival in Michigan.

I prepared myself to travel for a week without fans or fridge, but then my friend found an ingenious work-around so that I will now be able to power things as long as I am plugged into shore power, or while I am driving and the van engine is running. I have decided to travel in style this time, and treat myself to a few campgrounds on my trip north, with electrical hookups (I usually just park overnight for free in parking lots such as Cracker Barrel, which welcomes RV’ers but has no electrical hookups).

Looking back at this whole debacle, two important shifts happened fairly quickly. One, we were both able to face reality without letting emotions take over the show, and two, I was quickly able to recover a healthy sense of perspective. The loss was a big disappointment, and an unexpected inconvenience for sure, but it’s all replaceable material stuff. Once I surrendered to that, I was pleasantly surprised the next day when I learned that the company would offer a replacement, and I would not be out all that money after all.

In summary, I believe that mental agility is a learned skill. It helps if it was modeled for us in our childhood, but it’s never too late to train that muscle. It shows its strength in how we approach ideas that conflict with or appear to threaten our perspectives in life, or our sense of belonging; and it shows its strength in how we respond to situations that don’t go our preferred way.

The best way I know for developing our mental agility muscle, is to slow down and cultivate an experience of presence. When you are undistracted, still, and fully present, you meet reality right where it actually is. When you get still, drop your stories, and cease resisting or trying to bend reality, a spaciousness is accessed and it is in that spaciousness that you are able to connect with your highest wisdom. This wisdom then guides your responses and decisions. I think you will find, as I have, that you have maximum flexibility, resilience, ease and solution-finding ability from this grounded mindset. And even if your new muscle may cause rifts in some of your relationships, my experience has been that the most rewarding sense of connection is born in the spacious stillness of presence.

recognize what you do and don’t get to control
go with the flow
change gears easily
let go of what’s not working
focus on making what you desire welcome
presence
diet / natural hygiene all around
what do I not have to be / what can I be
self-responsibility
grounding
holding sorrow/pain with joy, in balance or harmony
surrender and acceptance of what is
time management (personalized to you)
take things less seriously / sense of humor / laugh at self
long view / patience / all we have is NOW
detachment from outcome / future
trusting intuition and what feels good/true (in healthy way)
shift gears consciously when needed
focus, and let go / focus, and let go
trust yourself to do your best