Author: Arshan Dhillon

Lesson From Books: Dance Dance Dance By Haruki Murakami

Arshan Dhillon

Fact is, I’d come to reclaim myself.

Dance Dance Dance is the sixth novel in Haruki Murakami’s rich bibliography. Although Dance can be read as a standalone, it’s best understood as a part of the Rat Trilogy which includes Hear The Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase. Dance is considered the epilogue to this trilogy and follows the same nameless protagonist. 

And as the quote above says, the protagonist’s aim in the book is to find a piece of himself. To reclaim himself. 

How I’d lost track of what mattered. How I worked like a fool for things that didn’t. How it didn’t make a difference either way. How I was losing form.

In life, knowing your ‘Why’ is extremely important in order to navigate the ups and downs of our reality. When we are younger, the Why is easier to define. Typically, the Why Thread goes something like this: I need to study hard. Why? So I can get good grades. Why? So I can get into a good college. Why? So I can get a good job. Why? So I can make money and live. 

That’s where the thread ends because for many people, making money is the end goal. But, there comes a time when earning a living isn’t good enough to navigate the ups and downs of life. This phenomenon is called a mid-life crisis but it doesn’t have to occur in your 30s or 40s. Rather, the crisis takes place when you’ve lost your why, your purpose behind your actions and when that happens, it feels as if we’re simply drifting through life without a sense of direction.

You’re probably right. As you say, I’ve lost and I’m lost and I’m confused. I’m not anchored to anything.

The nameless protagonist of the novel finds himself completely lost. In order to reclaim himself, he begins by tracing his past. He finds himself being pulled to the Dolphin Hotel where he encounters the Sheep Man. 

And yes, the Sheep Man is exactly how you pictured him. A man who is a sheep or maybe a sheep who is a man. Murakami excels in what’s called soft world building. Where elements of his story are left to be unpacked by the reader’s mind rather than being explained in a logical sense. In terms of this story, the Sheep Man is part of the protagonist’s psyche. 

In some ways, by going back into his past, he finds a piece of himself that will help him navigate his current life. And when he asks the Sheep Man or himself what to do, the answer is pretty simple.

“Dance,” said the Sheep Man.

The idea behind Sheep Man’s suggestion is a simple one. You have to dance with whatever life presents you. In other words, whatever happens to you in life, find a way to keep moving forward. It is when you stop dancing, stop moving, and lament in your sorrows that you lose all sense of direction and feel lost.

The famous psychologist, Viktor Frankl came to similar conclusions through his extreme trials in concentration camps. In his brilliant book, Man’s Search For Meaning, Frankl comes to the conclusion that we find our meaning in life by discovering the answers to the questions life presents us.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Part of discovering these answers is to move. If you keep dancing, then you will keep the forward momentum going and figure your way out.  

No promises you’re gonna be happy, the Sheep Man had said. So you gotta dance. Dance so it all keeps spinning.

Dancing can be viewed as taking action. Oftentimes in life what you should be doing or need to be doing isn’t clear right away. It’s only after you’ve started taking action and participating in life that you begin to see your personal path clear up in front of you.

You can think of it as shovelling snow, a metaphor the protagonist uses often in the book. But in this sense, through dancing, through action, your shovelling the snow around you until something precious and personal is uncovered that gives your life a meaningful direction. But without the shovelling, without the dancing, without the action, that would have never been uncovered. 

I was moving forward intently, one step at a time. I had focus, a goal. Which somehow, quite naturally, lightened my step, almost gave me soft-shoe footwork. This was a good sign. Dance. Keep in step, light but steady. Freshen up, maintain the rhythm, keep things going.

Through movement, through dancing, and through action, the protagonist is able to come to terms with his own mortality, along with accepting the absurd nature of life around him, and even finds a relationship by the end of the novel. 

None of which would have been possible if he didn’t dance. 

Haruki Murakami’s Writing Philosophy

Arshan Dhillon

Haruki Murakami has written 15 novels and many short stories over his nearly 45-year long writing career. His debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing, came out in 1979, while his most recent work, The City and Its Uncertain Walls was released in 2023. Murakami has produced several classic, genre-defying novels and stories in his writing career, but it’s his book on running that provides the most insights into his writing philosophy.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was published in 2007 in which Murakami unpacks his love and need for running. He takes a few detours to address his thoughts on writing, but more often than not, it’s the lessons he learned through his various running training and marathon and ultramarathon races he applied to his writing ventures to get the most out of his talent. 

The following 8 pieces are a mix of advice, perspective, and mindset which has helped Murakami in his writing adventures and also improved his habits.

Importance of Writing To Murakami 

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act. As a writer, then, and as a runner, I don’t find that writing and publishing a book of my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path. Perhaps I’m just too painstaking a type of person, but I can’t grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I’d never know what running means to me.

Writing is more than a job. It’s a way to understand life and one’s own experiences, emotions, and beliefs. When our thoughts are roaming freely in our heads, it’s difficult to pinpoint which ones are impactful and which ones you can discard. But when we pluck those thoughts from our heads and write them down on paper, they become something we can dissect, edit, question, and even challenge.

Through such processes, we can come to understand our own thought processes on a deeper level and discover what we really believe. Hence, writing is a kin to philosophy as philosophy at its core means a love for wisdom and through writing, we become wiser about ourselves.

Technique To Build Writing Rhythm

I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.

Hemingway in fact did say something similar.

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next.

Murakami used running as an example, so I’ll stay in the realm of physical exercise and draw upon weightlifting. With lifting weights, there is a thing called going to failure. It’s when you push yourself so hard during a set that you can even perform one more repetition of the movement. Although this technique has its use in building strength and muscles, it’s universally agreed upon that you shouldn’t go to failure every session and in fact, failure training should be selective during your entire program. The reason is, that type of training can take a toll on your body and it takes a while for your nervous system and your muscles to recuperate. 

Similarly, writing until you’re all out of words every day is akin to going to failure. Again, this could be helpful if you want to know how much endurance or focus you can produce. Something Murakami believes is essential for writing success. But in the long term, you will quickly fall out of the rhythm of writing because you will have more days where you have nothing to write. Instead, we should focus on building consistency.

I’m following one of my basic rules for training: I never take two days off in a row. Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it.

Once again, in the weightlifting world, there is a technique called greasing the groove. This is essentially when you do a set that stops at the halfway point to your failure. Meaning, if 10 pulls are your maximum, then you do just 4 or 5 pull-ups but you would do numerous sets. The point is to work on the technique of the exercise, garnering volume so that you can perform the exercise more often in a week.  

I have to maintain a certain tension by being unsparing, but not to the point where I burn out. These are tactics that all experienced runners learn over time.

Similarly, it’s better to write more often than it is to write more intensely. 

The main thing was not the speed or distance so much as running every day, without taking a break.

Have A Personal Standard

What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible.

Seeking validation from others is a slippery slope. This means you are putting your sense of fulfilment and happiness in other people’s hands. This will no doubt result in a turbulent emotional state as you receive both positive and negative feedback. Instead, it’s important to have a personal standard because it puts you in control.

There are three reasons I failed. Not enough training. Not enough training. And not enough training.

There aren’t many things in life we can control. The majority of it happens to us and it’s up to us to react properly. But there are a few things we have control over like our attitude and judgement. So, it’s important to exert this control and create a standard for ourselves. This way, the satisfaction of achieving or surpassing the standard is our own and failing to meet it is also our own. For the latter, the responsibility for the failure is key to making the right adjustments, so that when we try again, we can meet the standard.

At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

The Most Personal Is The Most Creative 

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. Take me as an example. It’s precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me to write stories that are mine alone. And because of this we have the extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what I’ve written. So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

Oscar-winning director, Bong Joon-ho also shared this sentiment, as well. As he accepted his Oscar, Bong Joon-ho mentioned Martin Scorsese’s saying ‘The most personal is the most creative’ has always guided his work. The reason the most personal is the most creative is because that’s where vulnerability lies. We cherish the things that are most personal to us or we keep them close to us, so no one can find out. Sometimes, what is the most personal to us is tragic and traumatic. Things we don’t want anyone to know about us. But it’s precisely that which makes us creative and stand apart from others. 

It’s when we are able to be vulnerable and share the deepest parts of our hearts that we can achieve something truly unique and whole us. 

Fully Commit Yourself

But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.

One of the worst feelings is to get rejected and know perfectly well that you deserved it because you didn’t give it your all. That you wasted the opportunity that presented itself to you. Often we act as if our dreams don’t come with an expiration date, but in reality, everything in life is temporary, including our goals and abilities to reach them. So, wasting opportunity leaves behind the worst type of regret. 

One way to nullify this is to fully commit to the project or task. Once again, vulnerability peaks its challenging head. You have to be vulnerable to commit yourself fully because if you get rejected, that means your efforts and skills weren’t good enough. We don’t have an out. We can’t fall back on the safety net of not trying hard enough. But not being good enough is decisive. We can work to get better or put our energy into something else. But the pain of regret chains us to our previous attempts and leaves us living in the past. 

Have A Structure In Place

I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers.

Life is full of distractions. Every day new apps come out that tug at our attention, which feeds off of how much time we spend watching, scrolling, and reading. And these apps are damn good at their job too. So, Murakami’s advice is even more important now than ever before because if you live a distracted life, it will be immensely difficult to achieve your goals, let alone any sense of excellence. 

It’s important to nip the trouble in the bud and see what actions in your life as leading you toward your goals and which ones are taking you away from them. Go all-in on the actions that are bringing you towards where you want to go and at least you will give yourself a fighting chance to get there. 

At the end of the day, you will get what you put in.

I haven’t spotted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort.

Three Requirements For Writing

In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run.

Murakami believes that there are three important factors. The most important is talent and below it are focus and endurance. Talent is innate, it is something you have or you don’t have.

If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning.

Focus and endurance are what you can build and grow with time and effort. These two factors are in your control.

After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed for a writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, two years.

Naturally, in order to increase your focus and endurance, you have to be patient. It takes time and effort to develop these two qualities. Murakami relates these factors to running. You may have a goal to run a marathon but first, you must be able to run a mile. Your muscles and cardiovascular system need to adjust to the 1-mile mark before you can run 2 miles, 3 miles and so on. As your cardio improves and muscles get stronger, your running technique also gets better through repetition.

Similarly, you have to slowly work the focus, and endurance muscles for writing. Perhaps you may have to start with 30 minutes of pure focus where all you think about is writing and then after a week of that, you increase it to 45 minutes and once your body adjusts to that speed, you increase your focus time to an hour. Endurance works the same way. Three days out of the week for writing and then four days and then five days and you may keep the five days for a few months until your body and mind have adjusted to this new level and then you increase it to six days.

It is in the practice of your routine that you get better as a writer and also as a runner. Murakami shares a funny story about the writer Raymond Chandler who seemed to share Murakami’s belief in endurance and focus.

In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him.

In doing so, writing then becomes a form of manual labor and not some creative output that seeps out of your pores and that you just need to write it all down and that’s it. It may be through the gruelling task of focusing every single day for weeks on end that you may discover that you have some talent. Your talent may not be known to you until you start your work. Murakami himself is an example of this. It was not until he was in his late 20s that he even got the idea to write and it would not be for a few more years until he discovered his own writing style and understood what novels he wished to write.

This discovery was simply aided by writing. The more effort he put into his work the better he understood it and the clearer his vision became. He had an understanding that his talent was not enough and that he needed to supplement the talent he did have by building up his focus and endurance. Murakami gives credit to running for building these two qualities.

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

Talent may be out of your control but focus and endurance are not. You can set yourself up for success if you build up those two qualities. The action that aids in this growth will help your understanding of writing, what you wish to say, what you wish not to say, your own do’s and don’ts and perhaps even discover that talent that is within. In fact, such an action will benefit you in all aspects of life and not just writing.

Follow Your Intuition

What I mean is, I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.

Life is short. Follow your interests, follow your inner voice, and follow your dreams and see if you can try and make something beautiful happen in your life before it’s all said and done. 

Prepare For The Worst Possible Outcome

Arshan Dhillon

In the book, How To Live: 27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Conclusion, Derek Sivers maps out several ways to live a good life. These include everything from being independent, to doing nothing, and even pursuing pain. Another way to live a good life is by preparing for the worst. 

Of course, this isn’t a wholly unique thought. We can go back thousands of years and read Stoic text that speaks about preparing for the worst possible outcome, so in case that outcome happens, it doesn’t knock us off our feet too badly. 

In the same vein, Sivers draws our attention to the fact that our current moment might be as best as it’ll ever get for us, bringing our attention toward gratitude, acceptance, and deliberate action.

So far, you’ve lived in a time of prosperity. You haven’t experienced massive devastation, but you probably will. It’ll be harder to make money. It’ll be harder to be happy. Much of what you love now will be gone. You’ll look back at this year as one of the easiest you ever had.

Sivers adds that with time, we are likely to get sick or injured and lose our ability to see, hear, move, or think. 

Some may see this type of thinking and conclude that the person is too negative or pessimistic. That by dwelling on such things, we’re ruining our present state. However, the opposite is true. When we think about the worst possible outcome, we can be grateful for the things we have. For example, how much gratitude would you express toward a loved one if you knew it was the last time you’ll ever see them?

The art of gratitude can be difficult to practice when we are navigating through life. Life is often busy and chaotic and in order to show gratitude, it requires us to take a break, pause for a moment, reflect and be grateful. That’s why the simple fact that we are alive and participating in life can be overlooked by so many people. When in fact, that is something to be grateful for.

As Sivers points out, with time our body will let us down, but in this moment, where we have our senses and ability to move freely, and more importantly, our ability to strengthen our bodies, we should be grateful for it. 

There is a possibility that our dreams won’t come true. That we will fail to reach our goals. Reflecting on this possibility brings about gratitude for the time you have had to dedicate to your goals and dreams. Not everyone gets the time to do so. Plus, we can have a Plan B ready, if Plan A doesn’t work.

There is also gratitude in the struggle so far. The challenges and obstacles you have overcome in pursuit of your goals and dreams.

To appreciate something fully, picture losing it. Imagine losing your freedom, reputation, money, and home. Imagine losing your ability to see, hear, walk, or talk. Imagine the people you love dying tomorrow. Never take them for granted.

By reflecting on the worst-case scenario, we also develop a sense of acceptance along with gratitude. 

Life right now could be as good as it gets. Part of our health is under our control and we need to do everything in our power to stay healthy. Part of our health isn’t under our control. Bad genetics and accidents are part of life. We accept that.

When it comes to pursuing our goals, we can control our effort, consistency, and iterations, but the result will still be out of our control. We accept that.

With time, we have partial control over how we spend our time and on what. But we don’t know how much time we really have. We accept that.

Do you know what’s behind each mountain of a challenge?

More mountains.

We also have to accept the challenges of life. Behind one obstacle, there lies another.

As we meditate on the worst-case scenario, another thing becomes abundantly clear.

This is how we want to act.

If you think about how you’ve been spending your recent days or sit down and write how you’ve spent the past month of your life or past six months of your life and hold that up against the realistic possibility of the worst-case scenarios, it can but a lot of things in perspective.

Wasting time, wasting moments, wasting days, wasting relationships, and so on have become the norm. The reason is that we assume we will have more time, or another moment, or another day. But that’s not true. So, in the present moment, we need to act deliberately. 

We should act in a manner that shows love and appreciation for those who are close to us.

We should act in a manner to appreciate the little joys in life like grabbing coffee with a friend, reading our favourite book, listening to our favourite artist, and eating at our favourite restaurants. 

You never know when it’ll be the last time you’ll feel these little joys.

We should also be strict with ourselves. To be disciplined with our time, diet, exercise, and work, but be lenient and flexible with others, as we don’t know what they are going through in their lives and perhaps it will be the last time you’ll interact with that person.

Sivers would also say that we should act in a manner that pursues deeper forms of fulfilment, rather than shallow ones.

Shallow happy is having a donut.

Deep happy is having a fit body.

Shallow happy is what you want now.

Deep happy is what you want most.

Shallow happy serves the present.

Deep happy serves the future.

Shallow happy is trying to conquer the world.

Deep happy is conquering yourself.

Shallow happy is pursuing pleasure.

Deep happy is pursuing fulfillment.

Fulfillment is more fun than fun.

And finally, we should act with gratitude and acceptance. 

Grateful for our life. Acceptance of our fate. 

Amor fati. 

Die On Purpose: A Meditation Practice

Arshan Dhillon

Our waking hours can be full of stimuli. We are constantly bombarded with attention-grabbing and attention-seeking things all day long. This can leave our heads a jumbled mess of thoughts, impulses, and desires. It doesn’t take much for our thoughts to become overwhelming. One or two things compound and we begin that awful spiral of overthinking and contemplating how our lives can fall apart if we don’t get ‘X’ done or how we really badly need to do ‘Y’ or else…If ‘Z’ doesn’t happen then…all of these big jumps in conclusions and judgements can plague us when we are in ‘being mode’.

That’s a term Jon Kabat-Zinn uses in his book, Wherever You Go, There You Are. When we are in ‘being mode’, we are constantly thinking about what to do. We are acting, consuming, and thinking. The best way to unplug from this mode is to focus on the present feelings and sensations.

A good way to stop all the doing is to shift into the “being mode” for a moment. Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

When we do this, one thing happens for sure. Everything around you goes on. That’s the harsh reality of life. Life can and will go on without you. When we are in ‘being mode,’ we can overvalue our existence and need. It feels like everything around us depends on our next action, so we have to do the right thing. We have to be productive. We have to make decisions and choices. We have to keep moving and acting. 

But when we unplug for a moment and see that life goes on perfectly fine without you. And even if there is a hiccup because you’ve stepped away for a moment, you know that part will get smoothed out soon enough. 

Kabat-Zinn compares this understanding to our death.

In some ways, it’s as if you died and the world continued on. If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you.

I liken this to the death of our ego. Of feeling important. When we are so plugged into what’s happening, we can’t get a clear picture of what we actually need. What will actually benefit us because we are so focused on all the stimuli around us.

Another aspect of this meditation is to step off of the conveyor belt of consumption. Content is king these days and along with that, consuming content has become an impossible task to keep up with. We have this overwhelming desire to watch the latest show, to listen to every podcast under the sun, to practice millions of different routines, diets, and exercises. Every second there is a new trend that grabs hold of our culture and it feels like if we don’t participate in it, we’ll be left behind. 

But the reality is that almost all of it is just momentary pleasure. Entertainment right now. When we take a break, step away, and focus on something other than consuming, we see that missing out on a TV show or the latest online drama has no impact on our lives.

More than that, think about all the time you have spent consuming these types of things and can you even recall a single moment of it six months later? A month later? A week later? Time moves quickly and with it, new content pops up to take our attention and play at our impulses.

But, by practicing dying on purpose, we can differentiate not only which actions are important in our lives but also what things to really spend our time on. 

If this is true, maybe you don’t need to make one more phone call right now, even if you think you do. Maybe you don’t need to read something just now, or run one more errand. By taking a few moments to “die on purpose” to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. By “dying” now in this way, you actually become more alive now. This is what stopping can do. There is nothing passive about it. And when you decide to go, it’s a different kind of going because you stopped. The stopping actually makes the going more vivid, richer, more textured. It helps keep all the things we worry about and feel inadequate about in perspective. It gives us guidance.

Through dying then we reclaim our life.

Kabat-Zinn finishes off this thought process by suggesting a meditation practice.

Try stopping, sitting down, and becoming aware of your breathing once in a while throughout the day. It can be for five minutes, or even five seconds. Let go into full acceptance of the present moment, including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening. For these moments, don’t try to change anything at all, just breathe and let go. Breathe and let be. Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are. Then, when you’re ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.

Khalil Gibran & David Goggins On How To Create A Positive Self-Image 

Arshan Dhillon

He stares in the mirror and sees three things. First, the sweat which trickles down his forehead, dotting the mat underneath. Second, the pair of dumbbells that lay at the foot of the mat. The third is himself. Wearing a half-sleeved shirt, his arms and shoulders are pumped with blood from the workout. The sight of them draws a smile out of him. But that smile wavers and drops away like the pair of dumbbells dropping on the rubber mats. The thudding sound anchored his smile as he felt his midsection through the shirt. Grabbing at the loose skin and pockets of fat which still lingered. 

The mirror only reflected one thing now.  

Self-image is an individual’s perception of themselves, including their physical appearance, personality, and characteristics. The way we perceive ourselves influences things like self-esteem, self-worth, and self-confidence. 

In our current day and age, I believe that our self-image is under a microscope more than ever before. Meaning, because we have so many outlets to compare ourselves with other people (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook), and because there are so many self-help gurus on various platforms and media talking about constant productivity and improvement, it has resulted in a constant bombardment of our self-image. 

Everywhere you look, you can see what you’re doing wrong, what you’re not doing enough of, how you should be acting, what you need to do, why the way you are isn’t enough, and how you can change yourself.

Of course, there are benefits to this type of input. We do want to learn and grow and improve. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a better version of ourselves. However, the difficulty lies in stopping all of this input from creating a negative self-image and along with it a negative self-worth, self-esteem, and self-confidence.

Part of the problem lies in what we choose to focus on. With all of these different inputs, it is easy to focus on what we haven’t done or what we have done poorly. This results in a negative self-image. 

Khalil Gibran touched on this subject in his incredibly thoughtful book, The Prophet. Gibran’s advice boils down to our perception. Instead of constantly highlighting the lows and the mistakes we make as we continue to march through life, we should take the time to remind ourselves of all the good things we have done. All the positive things we have accomplished.

You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link.

This is but half the truth. You are also as strong as your strongest link.

To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam.

To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.

An agreement we sign with life is that it will be difficult, challenging, and we’ll face many failures. But along with this, we also get to overcome obstacles, change our habits for the better, and accomplish our goals. 

But the mirror of life tends to reflect only those things our mind is trained to perceive. Just as someone who is dedicated to exercising and yet can only spot the deficiencies in their physique, we too end up focusing overwhelmingly on the failures and missteps. 

However, if our perception changed just one or two degrees, so the aforementioned individual can see the progress he or she has made to their arms or how much their strength has increased, their self-image will bolster. In the same way, a degree of change in our perception can reveal all the mini-wins we have had prior to a failure or mistake.

Retired Navy Seal and ultra-athlete, David Goggins has a concept that he likes to call the cookie jar. The cookie jar is a list of your accomplishments which you can fall back on when you need them. And because these are your personal accomplishments, they can be whatever you like. For someone who reads all the time, finishing a book might not qualify for the cookie jar. But for someone who hasn’t read a book in years, that is something you can deposit in your cookie jar to pull out at some later point in your life when you’re feeling negativity seeping into your self-image. While for the reader, maybe they haven’t run in a while, so running one mile can qualify for the cookie jar. 

The cookie jar concept by David Goggins is a good way to combat the negative influx and reaffirm your self-image by reminding yourself of all the strong links you have built.

So that our self-image can be built on a foundation of wins and challenges faced, rather than focusing on the occasional crack in the foundation when we mess up. Because in due time, that crack will be plastered over as we continue to strengthen our strongest link.