The Daily Valet. - 6/25/22, Saturday
✔️ Weekend Reading: Live Like a Viking
Weekend of June 25th
Too much comfort can kill your growth. Our resident life coach, Sean Hotchkiss, offers up a thousand-year-old solution.
Cory Ohlendorf , Editor ⋯ @coryohlendorf
Weekend Reading
How to Live Like a Viking
Too much comfort kills our growth. Here’s a thousand-year-old solution.
One of my vices over the last few years has been Viking shows and movies: The Last Kingdom, The Northman, Vikings and Vikings: Valhalla. If it involves axes, longboats and pagan mythology, I'm all-in.
My fascination with Viking warriors centers around how viscerally they lived: brutal yet deeply spiritual, in a constant dance with the gods, death and their destinies. As one of my female friends remarked recently after watching an episode of Vikings: “Those are men.” And I had to agree, she was right.
Part of the Viking male mystique for me is how they made peace with and even embraced the inevitable discomfort of living hard. They were tough! No doubt my Northmen ancestors would have a deep belly laugh over my smartphone scrolling, sweatshirt rocking, Erewhon produce perusing life. It'd probably bore them to tears. And while it's pretty great that as modern guys we don't have to split Saxon heads just to put food on the table, what we lose with our addiction to ease is the ability to grow. As Connor Beaton, founder of the organization ManTalks writes: “Your comfort kills your expansion. You're meant to press against your edge constantly. To see where your limits are, what you can handle, build, and bear the responsibility of...”
I see some variation of this theme of comfort vs. edge come up constantly when I'm coaching and in men's groups:
Man has to have a difficult conversation at work or at home. But man has no practice having difficult conversations. So he avoids it, and in that avoidance sets up further discomfort down the road.
Man feels racked by self doubt, afraid to do anything outside his comfort zone or routine. His life feels meaningless and void of adventure, so he escapes into work, weed, alcohol, TV or porn.
Man loathes his job or his relationship, but is attached to the comfortable lifestyle it provides him. So he keeps taking it on the chin, grinding his soul into peanut butter while failing to search for something that makes him feel truly alive. His whole life suffers as a result.
I've been guilty of all of these at different times in my life. And for years, I wondered what the alternative was. I felt sandwiched by indecision and fear, unable to move forward, unable to choose a path. I craved guidance, advice, or mentoring, but all my elders seemed to be just slightly older versions of me: still wary, still playing it safe, still tip-toeing around when what they wanted was to take a leap.
In ancient cultures, there was always an initiation that brought young boys into manhood. This initiation was marked by the removal of the boys from the comfort of the mother, the hearth, the family, and into the arena of men. Part of this initiation would always be some sort of ritualized discomfort: scarring, tattooing, fasting, isolation or sacred combat. This was always done in the highest reverence of the initiate, and was not meant to hurt, per se, but to be a felt experience of what the boy's life would be like as an adult. It was if to say: manhood is uncomfortable. Here, this is how it feels to be a man.
Because these kinds of initiations into manhood no longer exist on the whole, we tend to stay a little too long—collectively—in our comfort zones. Many of us opt for ease over risk if given the choice: rather than sharing our bold, creative idea IRL at the meeting, we send a passive email days later. Instead of making a move and talking to the attractive person at the coffee shop, we slink back home only to watch porn later. And these denials of our inner urgings add up. Eventually, we lose our sense of aliveness.
One way to ease into a relationship with discomfort is to practice it regularly. And start small. One of my first intentional discomfort practices was taking ice cold showers in the wintertime in New York City. Every extra second under that water was living proof I could do something difficult. I have friends who do ice baths, cold plunges and 140 degree infrared saunas to similar effect. Others train and run in ultra marathons, while other guys cover themselves in tattoos (a very Viking move, indeed).
For other guys, the chosen discomfort will be less tactile, but no less daring. Asking for help from a therapist, coach or counselor—as any man who has done it knows—can be highly uncomfortable. Ditto sharing our authentic feelings with a circle of men in a men's group. Or maybe your discomfort du jour is launching the podcast you've been sitting on, standing up for yourself with your family, or having that challenging (but easily avoidable) conversation with your colleague or boss. Maybe it's trying out for improv. Or simply talking to a stranger. Perhaps it's adopting a dog from your local shelter. However you choose to practice discomfort, the important question to return to every so often is: “Where is an edge for me today?” And then: “How can I lean a little more into it?”
This past winter, with my head filled with images of Viking glory, I realized it would be an edge for me to learn how to fight. (It had been about three decades since my last real scuffle, when I body-slammed an eight year old bully named Kris on the playground.)
So I took up boxing. And the few hours I spend with my instructor, an ex Serbian special forces team member named Tika, are some of my most fun and expansive of my week. Having an older man push you beyond your comfort zone—it's amazing the healing effect the experience can provide, especially for those of us who lacked strong father energy as a boy. When Tika sees me slacking during a set, or dropping my arms during the third minute of a round, he rumbles like a bear in his deep, Eastern block accent:
“Cmmmonnnnn Shhhoooowwwnn.”
That kicks me right back into gear. And after most sessions I want to hug him, because he's doing for me what I struggled for years to do for myself: pushing me past my edges into the unknown territory of my own personal power, my own glory. And, as the Vikings knew, that is the place where life starts to get interesting (and perhaps a bit spiritual, too).
Want to feel more comfortable in your own skin?
Sean has just launched a newsletter, The Naked Man. It's something of a meeting place at the intersection of his old gig (menswear) and his new one (mental and emotional health), and a venue to dive even deeper into the important questions we've explored here at The Inside Man on a more consistent basis. Why naked? Well, a naked man needs nothing. He's secure in himself, secure in his place in the world.
See you Monday.
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