The end goal…?
After commentating Urban Fight Night 32 last Saturday, a few thoughts came to me around the variety of emotions that people feel going through something as intense as competing in the cage.
On that evening, the Main Event was Raymart Quintana vs Joshua Murphy, with the storyline of that fight about ‘Razor’ Ray’s return to the cage after 5 years off.
I always like talking to the athletes before the event to gleam some insights into their mindset, their energy and whether they have any thoughts on how things would unfold on the night.
I caught up with Ray backstage and I asked him why was he coming back after such a long lay off. I could see his eyes light up as he commented back to me that although he’s been running a business and doing well outside of competition, he had never felt more alive than during the last 8 weeks of fight camp in preparation for this return to mixed martial arts.
What an amazing feeling for him to make a successful return against a tough competitor, no doubt a peak in terms of the emotion relief, joy and happiness.
And then…?
In a few days, the gloss of that victory will start to fade a little and no doubt, as most fighters experience, it’s time to get back into training, re-focus on the new task ahead and start to chase the next high, the next victory and so forth.
Oddly enough, there’s a weird similarity to the world of selling cars, where each month, you’re only as good as your last, you can’t really rest on your past victories, because they definitely don’t guarantee your future success.
Perhaps having gone through that monthly build up for so long in my automotive career I’m a bit desensitised to pressures of end of month, kind of like competition.
Don’t get me wrong, I get the same doubts, the same fears, worries as everyone else, however I think in terms of maturity compared to how I would approach this as the younger me, vs how I would approach it now - the result actually doesn’t mean as much anymore.
Because it was the process of going through the experience that mattered most - the outcome is whatever the outcome will be.
There will always be more work to be done.
I was making a point about this on a Podcast (it hasn’t been released yet), how if you were to ask what people wanted in life, a fair few would probably say they would want to be ‘happy’.
However happiness as an emotional state is actually relative, because if you never experienced sadness, how would you be able to define happiness? It would just be one emotion, with no difference between either one (quite a boring existence right?)
Part of the wondrous experience of life is the notion that we don’t know how it’s all going to turn out.
For each fighter who walked away victorious that night, there was one who walked away in defeat.
The disappointment, the sadness the doubts - experiencing the opposite of what the ‘winners’ would have been feeling.
Sometimes people would use the phrase - ‘we win or we learn’ to come to turns with a loss, however whilst a nice kind of consolation, I would say every experience is a learning - even our wins (because we should be learning from all of our experiences if we’re looking to develop)
So how do we then deal with the negative emotions that stick to us when we don’t come away with the goal achieved?
I would suggest that the end goal isn’t a ‘happy’ life, but one where we find ‘peace’.
If you think about what we say when someone passes away in our lives - ‘Rest in Peace’ is the singular expression we wish upon people as they leave this world.
Let’s think about that for a moment - we don’t wish them ‘happiness’, or ‘prosperity’ (Asian’s love money right?!)… We wish for them to find peace, to rest, in peace.
There’s a little bit of wisdom in that - if the one blessing we wish upon people when they leave this world is to be at peace, why do we wait for death to find it?
So I guess the point of this musing is that I suggest that the end goal for all of us, is to find peace - if possible whilst we’re alive, if not, hopefully when we die.
When we talk about experiencing the fullness of life, this means experiencing all of the emotions. Without experiencing the full gambit of emotions we wouldn’t be experiencing the fullness of life right?
It’s fairly easy to accept a win or a victory or the good things that happen to us, but do we approach our losses the same way?
Do we only play the game because we win or do we play the game irrespective of whether we win or lose and just enjoy the game for what it is?
That’s probably a topic for another day, in the meantime, no matter what emotions you’re experience in life, I hope you can be at peace with them…