The soul is the prize.
The soul is the prize.
A reminder that keeps crawling up from, and out of, every corner, crevice, and cranny of my mind lately. Likely because I’ve started competing again (Hyrox) and the mystic chords of memory escort me back to a place I invite you to re-visit with me.
On the eve of every high school football game, nestled in bed and lamp lit, I used to read four verses in Corinthians. The excerpt starts like this: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”
The verses continue: “[t]herefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified from the prize.” (Corinthians 9:24 – 27).
Why I picked these words was lost on me at the time. But call to me, they did. And 12 years later, call to me, they continue.
You see, I came to the realization that what’s buried in these lines is the reason that I love training so much. Because the gym is an arena that offers me the opportunity, every day, to show up and “strike a blow to my body and make it my slave” so that I will not be “disqualified from the prize.” And the soul is the prize.
Not the aesthetics that will wash away with time; not the “crown that will not last.” No, the prize is the piece of our nature that is eternal and divine. The only piece of us worthy of wonder. The soul.
In whatever arena we compete—fitness, entrepreneurship, or the creation of good art—each time we deny the lower impulse of the ego and refuse to the yield to the voice of Resistance that tempts us to attend to the desires of the flesh, and stretch, instead, in the direction we feel called, we set the sails of our soul in a nobler direction and shape ourselves into something more resembling the divine.
We mold ourselves, as Seneca might say, in kinship to thy God so that which otherwise would have been lost in darkness might shine before the world.
Yet a steel soul will not come at first call; we must return to the blade every day and hammer away—forging ourselves in the burning fire of continuous inner confrontations where we struggle against our own weaknesses. 10,000 battles with Resistance and its army. 10,000 victories by restraint in the face of an impulse to act selfishly or continued action against the impulse to give up—many of which nobody, except yourself, will see.
So remember: there are races to be run and inner wars to be won. And the more you exercise the muscles of restraint and resilience—in whatever you arena may be—the more you ensure that you are not simply the puppet of your lower impulses and protopassions. The more you ensure that your soul is the one writing the story. And, I suspect, the more you will thank yourself when you meet yourself at the end of it all.