Socrates: “It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.”
A lot of people (including me!) have thought long and hard about how to achieve peak physical performance. Everyone’s optimizing for something, and whatever it is—strength, health, beauty, talent, knowledge, GPA, income, status, fame—there’s an app for that, and lots of freely available advice on the Internet (some of which is even good!).
When we try to optimize for things like wealth, health, and beauty, we structure our lives in specific ways that are usually very easy to recognize. Everyone pretty much knows what it looks like to optimize for wealth, health, or beauty; everyone knows lots of people who optimize for those things.
What about spirituality? What would it look like to achieve peak spiritual performance? And lest that question seem too performance-based: What would it look like to achieve optimal closeness to God?
Could we even recognize a life that optimized for such a thing? Could we even know what such a life would look like? And if we could, would we—would I—be genuinely willing to pursue it?
Brave Ole World 