For a small country of about 26 million, Australia is very competitive across a number of sports. The swimming pool normally is the place most medals come from, however there are a others that pop up from time to time also. Today, on the first full day of Olympic competition Grace Brown took the gold in the women's cycling time trials in what was a massive effort in very hard conditions to take the win by over a minute from second and third. However, what is more incredible perhaps, is that before the games even started, Grace announced her retirement from competitive cycling at the end of the 2024 season.
A dream way to go out.
While it is great to see the gold medals for home countries, it is also very easy to start to feel some sense of accomplishment in it also, as if I was involved in her success. It is also easy to take the "we win, they lose" stance when things go the other way with who we barrack for, isn't it?
While I know I can't take any credit at all for all the hard work that these athletes from the countries put into getting there and then actually winning, I am still entitled to be inspired by it. This sets me up with a bit of an issue, as while it makes me want to get out and get moving -
here I am sitting on the couch.
We went to the beach with Smallsteps' friend and her mother yesterday for a couple hours, and we were talking about exercise and the motivation required. For her, it was the realization that once she hit forty, she recognized how much mobility she had lost and how true it is that the best thing a woman can do to improve condition, is lift weights. I think that the younger women realize this earlier, but for people around my age, there is still this "do aerobics" mentality, that has been carried over from our parents.
So much of our behaviors as adults are developed in childhood and from the rolemodels we had. Parents play a big part in this in the early years, before peers start becoming more influential through the school ages. As we were talking yesterday about body positivity, I mentioned that it isn't good enough just to talk the talk and say things like, "Don't worry about what others think", the role model also has to act it. However, that is easier said than done, as people tend to follow the crowd to avoid judgement, or to avoid standing out.
We were talking about clothes people are "comfortable" wearing and it tends not to be that much about comfort or even what an individual feels they look good in, and more about what they think others will think of them. For instance, my ex that visited Australia with me bought a lot of clothing that she looked and felt fantastic in, but once we got back to Finland, she never wore them again. The reason was that the styles were different to the styles people wore here, and that made her feel uncomfortable. In Australia, not knowing anyone other than my family, she didn't have to worry about what others thought of her.
Comfortable clothing often seems to be what other people will accept.
And as we kept talking about social media influence and other aspects of peer pressure, I mentioned how I think that parenting itself follows fashions, where certain behaviors are acceptable. However, unlike in the past, the fashions on social media are changing incredibly fast, which means that the styles are changing before any particular approach would be able to build habits and long-term impacts.
This chopping and changing of approach is like social media itself, where disjointed content is continually streaming with information volume being high, but very little of it supporting depth and building on each other. It is a lot of random, and before a mind can even consider what it has seen in one post, it is onto the next post that has nothing to do with the last. It is no wonder that people's concentration and skill levels are suffering.
If we look at the Olympic athletes as role models, it is clear that in order to get to that level, it takes dedication and commitment to the discipline. It is why they are called "disciplines" at all, right? In order to do well, to build the skills necessary, one has to invest time, effort, energy, money and forego so much of what the rest of us do in order to get there.
But, while they might be at the pinnacle, it should also indicate to us that doing what everyone else does, is not going to help us perform that well. And that means, doing what we think others expect of us, doing what makes strangers happy, is not going to make us more comfortable, it is going to make us less.
I can't take credit for any athlete or for anyone else's results at all, that is up to them. It also means that our failures are also our own, not someone else's. We can't always correct the lessons of the past, or the impacts others have made on us. But what we can do is try to be our best. And what that means, is doing whatever helps us be just a little bit better.
I wonder what happens in the results of a country if everyone in it worked to be a little bit better.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
