As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body. ~Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Something resonated with me while listening to Anthony Robbins speak in a seminar called Energy For Life, and that is when he asked “how can you be passionate about anything, including your job, love, hobbies etc., when you are exhausted?” The answer is, you can’t.
I talk about how I love my job to no end, but when the day gets long, or it started off with a lot of pain right off the bat, I can’t wait to get out of there as soon as my shift is over. I essentially become a clock watcher, someone who every few minutes checks to see what time it is, and those minutes seem to last an eternity.
Every day I do my best to avoid talking about what I feel I’m lacking in my health, because that is not what I want to attract more of. I instead try to focus on my weight loss, which has given me much more energy than I have ever had before, but still I can’t deny that I felt pain, and that was holding me back. I wanted to exercise more, but then I go and blow out my knee, and then right during the middle of that, I ended up in the emergency room one night, because I got stuck on the couch for over an hour. My back pain was so severe I couldn’t get off of the couch, and when I finally did, I almost got stuck standing in the hallway, just trying to get to my bedroom for a pain killer.
How did I get here? Well fear. Fear of pain, fear of hard work, fear of letting go of comforts, fear of challenges, fear of failure. FEAR! It’s the ugliest four letter word in our vocabulary. People worry about F bombs, when the only F bomb I don’t want to hear out of anyone I happen to love, their mouth, that is the word fear.
To decide to do something about your life, means to first admit you’re not doing something right, right off of the bat you are admitting to being a “failure.” It takes courage, or a lot of pain to decide to change the things you don’t like about yourself. We’re talking about exercise right? Yep. Something as simple as exercise. Because it does involve hard work, it does involve making a commitment, and initially it involves a certain amount of pain, and pain is what we’re trying to avoid right?
Then there are the what ifs. What if I fail? What if after all this hard work I still don’t look like Brad Pitt? What if after losing all the weight she / he still doesn’t love me? What if…. fill in your own what ifs here.
But then these pains can be a motivator. My health was so poor I had to make a choice to do something about it. My initial choice was to have weight loss surgery, and initially I felt great. I lost a lot of weight, and for the things I was doing my health was just fine. Then I got a “real” job, and boy was I not ready. Now it is pain that has become so unbearable, that I am forced to work through it, and actually take on more pain initially, in order to get to a better place in my health. This is another example of accepting “what is,” and surrendering to the present. But I know I am getting stronger, and each and every day my muscles and joints become more flexible.
I am committed to my health, and I am committed to making better, healthier all around choices when it comes to my mind, body, and soul. I am grateful that I have learned this before it was too late, and because of that, I am living a happier, more productive life.
