I became a right little shit when we moved to Sheffield.
This makes sense now. It’s also when I moved from apples and milk to chocolate and hard drugs. Well. The drugs came later. I’m back to craving apples now. And milk.
Meditating on anger these last two days and seeing the dancing man has definitely curated this flow. This is good. The buddha led the way and I am following. There are few more valid pursuits. It’s what I did in shikoku. It’s what I’ve done my whole life.
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.
I have heard this in so many words but the world never evidenced it. I was taught to fight when we moved to Sheffield. It was violent and I was new and my dad was from an even more violent place and helped me to survive.
Unfortunately I got too good. That’s what happened. I got too good at fighting, mentally, and I was never able to stop. I was probably hypervigilant already because of the neurochemistry of audhd but school was 3 fistfights per week for 5 years, often against groups, or unprovoked. I didn’t instigate, but I had rules, and my rules were:
never start a fight but always finish it
never go down
never hit them when they are down
always protect the weak (this trumps 1)
These were non-negotiable to me, as were friendship dynamics, in hindsight. This dance, this water, this fluid flowing movement which is human society; I’m not in it. I don’t flow. That’s ok but I never realised all these years so the waves kept crashing and I had no idea why. That will break anyone’s back.
This kid never stopped though. He left. To Japan. No physical fighting any more, thank god. Now it’s money. Who’s the biggest kid in the playground? Take him down. Make a stand. Loosen your jaw and smile. Go through him.
All of last year I was saying my fight was over but he just wouldn’t die.
Anyway there’s no winning in Tokyo. The big boys aren’t groups of 5 they’re 5,000. So off to cycle the world. And I set up a company; free, on my own terms, Thailand, great for a while. So great. Being able to work from a golf course my wife worked at. Peace and quiet - we were right in the middle of nowhere with nobody else in the unit. We even had a power cut for 2 weeks. Wife found it creepy but nice; I just found it nice. Looking back, it was probably the perfect setup.
But the corruption in the government in Thailand. The lack of social support for their citizens. We couldn’t tolerate it so we left. Italy went badly and England went worse, but I’ll leave that alone for now. Bag of worms.
One breakdown later we’re in Japan and it’s all a blur after that. Drinking, stopping, ironman to the level of placing; all medication for the stresses of life. 2 children premature, second born at the start of covid in NICU while the hospital was locked down. Building a company working with Japan’s top venture and trying to retire in 3 years.
Essentially I optimised ‘make money’ and ‘work hard’ far too much. Because of brain; it’s not my fault. No wonder I burned out.
But I think it’s all this fighter. And this fighter existed because of some rules. And those rules… I don’t know if they’re fully gone because they’re deep. The ironman one isn’t gone for example but it feels weird putting it back on now.
These personas are never going anywhere so what I should do is use them, just like my old professional network. The fighter is the retired champ. The ironman is the coach. The businessman is the mentor.
This.
This is why I need to type and process like this. That realisation right there is gold for me. It might happen naturally for someone else. If you don’t have regular time signalling though, how can you ever grow up? I have to teach myself.
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