80 days to Ultraman Mexico

07/29/25 – 80 Days to Ultraman

I still have time. 80 days until the race. That feels small, but so much can happen. It may be better to think of it in hours. There are a tremendous number of hours in 80 days. Training is done in hours and minutes. The race will be done in hours and minutes. The fact that I have made it to the point I am training for this race at all is incredible. My life could have gone very differently. There are, of course, the infinite alternatives, but there are very real paths I could have gone down. Paths that were destructive, short, and disappointing.

These are all ideas. Ideas from the past about possible alternative pasts. Imaginations. What is in the present is what’s real. This is where I must train my focus. Only in the present can action come about. Here and now is where true intelligence lives. The ability to perceive this moment must be developed not through building but through dismantling. Being aware of the illusions I hold, internalizing them, understanding them.

I must find out who I am in order to let go of it entirely. Once I understand it, I can work with it. Then I will be able to perceive the moment and let my full being experience and react to the present. All my worries, fears, and insecurities are from the past. They live there, but still in the present moment I am caught up in their energy. I fantasize about what could be, what might be, what I imagine was. Faced with the uncertainty and indescribable nature of the present moment, I rush into the security that concepts and ideas offer. This happens immediately and naturally. I feel unaware it is happening as it happens. Even gaining a slight awareness that I am not present is not enough to shock me out of the stupor.

I have so addicted myself to the past that it is totally disguised as building the future. What future can be imagined that is not totally composed of past ideas? Only the previously known can be used as material for building a future that is imaginable. What is imagined will never come to pass. Reality is impossible to fully imagine. It is easy to delude oneself that when something happens you have planned and imagined it exactly as it played out, but this is a fabrication. Did you imagine the humidity, the textures, the red curtains in shifting lights, the discordant voices overlapping each other washing over your senses, your heart rate changing? If you did imagine it all, can you say for certain you noticed and were aware of every detail in that moment? No. What happens is we set ourselves on a narrative and we perceive everything as supporting or in opposition to it. We believe ourselves to be the central component of this story, and when it comes time to end it, we rewrite our life from a rough draft into finished copy. We make something to sell to ourselves and to everyone else. This obsession with legacy is nothing more than a pacification of the mind through story.