There is a stretch of road on the SPRR where I have done my long rides for years, and every single time, somewhere around the 80 km, my mind starts negotiating with me. Maybe today is enough. Maybe the legs feel a little off. Maybe I should turn back and call it a day. The negotiation has become so familiar that I almost find it funny.
Krishna gets this conversation. In the Bhagavad Gita 6.34, Arjuna does what most of us do when faced with something hard. He tells Krishna the task is impossible. The mind is restless, he says, turbulent, strong, obstinate. To control it is harder than holding the wind in your hand. I read that line and I want to reach across thousands of years and shake Arjuna's hand.
Krishna's answer, in the very next verse, is the answer no one wants. Yes, he says. The mind is restless. And you tame it through abhyasa, through repeated practice, and through vairagya, a slow loosening of your grip on what the practice is supposed to give you.
I think about this on the bike. I think about it in the plant when a delivery slips for the third time in a week and I notice my mind preparing the same speech it has prepared a hundred times before. I think about it watching the LinkedIn follower count tick along, and I remind myself the work is the practice. The numbers will go where they go.
More than 2.5 decades in this industry has taught me that abhyasa is rarely glamorous. It looks like the same email at the same time. The same morning swim. The same conversation with a supplier you have had eighty times before. None of it makes for a good photograph.
Krishna was right, as Krishna usually is. The mind settles in time. You stop asking it to be different than it is, and you keep doing the work.