Happy Sunday, Everyone. 

Imagine you’re lost in the wilderness trying to find your way back to town with a compass. Only “North” keeps changing. You start heading “north” and it flips, sending you 180 degrees in the other direction. Then it swaps 45 degrees, then another 45 degrees. It won’t stay still, and you keep heading toward it, never getting anywhere but lost, never going anyplace but in the wrong direction. 

You won’t get back to town. You might, if you’re lucky, but it won’t be because you followed “north.” It would be dumb luck. There’s nothing reliable you can count on working.

The answer is clear.

You’re using the wrong compass. You’re using an external locus—one that’s constantly changing positions. That will never work. It can’t.

Look: this is the situation many of us find ourselves, especially if you subscribe to Primal heath principles. 

We have coworkers and family members who honestly do care about us, but have the complete wrong idea of health, sending us articles based on studies conducted on populations who live, eat, and sleep completely differently from us. Do they really apply to us, or might we be some of those outliers whose data points get excluded from the data? Or those outliers who were excluded from the study design from the outset?

We have health officials who’ve been telling us to avoid meat and sun and deadlifts for decades, and now they’re telling us something else. Are we to ignore their previous advice and listen to the new stuff? Or the other way around? 

I’m throwing out this cacophony of hypothetical situations because if you try to listen to what everyone else is saying about health, about where the world is going, about what you have to do to stay happy and keep moving forward, you’ll go insane. You’ll be going in circles forever and, like the guy in the wilderness with the crazy compass, your shifting locus will doom you. 

Don’t lose yourself. Don’t run around like a chicken with your head cut off.

Look inside. Develop an internal compass based on an internal locus.

On Friday’s New and Noteworthy, I linked to the definition of “Primal.” This blog, this entire endeavor I’ve been doing for over ten years, isn’t just about bringing primitive wisdom into the modern world. It’s also about discovering what is most primary inside each of you. Don’t forget that. You come first. What you intuit, what you feel in your gut, what you know to be true based on what you’ve done before. 

There’s your compass. That’s your locus. We all have one. 

How’s yours? Tell me about your internal compass in the comments of New and Noteworthy.

#listentothesisson