Here is a quote from a book called Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. The book itself has nothing to do with wrestling or even athletics, but I found this passage particularly inspiring. He illustrates better than I can the concept of Jumping Levels through his image of a mountain. In his flowrestling blog, Matt Valenti says he pictures The Comfort Zone as a box to be stretched; I picture it as a mountain, waiting to be climbed. Enjoy the hike.
“If we think of the struggle as a climb up a mountain, then we must visualize a mountain with no top. We see a top, but when we finally reach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. We now see the “real” top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we’ve reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably.
Knowing that the mountain has no top, that it is a perpetual quest from plateau to plateau, the question arises, “Why the struggle, the conflict, the heartbreak, the danger, the sacrifice. Why the constant climb?” Our answer is the same as that which a real mountain climber gives when he is asked why he does what he does. “Because it’s there.” Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys in a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of an illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the unknown. Paradoxically, they give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heights of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare—an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security.”
PS: Anyone who has ever climbed the Cog Trail in Colorado Springs, knows exactly the feeling of reaching the "fake" top.
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