I think I
have a pretty good (if somewhat cynical) grasp of human nature.
My understanding
of “how people are” informs my belief that the most of us—a number in the 98th
percentile, I’d guess—will utterly fail when attempting to make big changes to
their behavior.
Big
changes like, for instance, transforming oneself from a fat slug with a bad
attitude about exercise and no positive habits of thought, or of eating, or of
relaxation to a positive, energetic, 6 times a week exerciser.
Every
time a friend or acquaintance informs me, usually with great gusto, that he or
she intends to (fill in this blank with anything from doubling the size of
their business to going back to school to get a law degree to losing 50 pounds
to eliminating TV from their lives), I always try to be encouraging.
But there’s
a part of me that loudly screams (within the confines my own head, of course), “Yeah,
SURE you are! Because that’s how this works: you just decide after 30 years
that you’re gonna be completely different, and because you’re so excited about
it, it’s gonna happen. NOT!!!”
That screamy
part of me sounds like I WANT people to fail. I don’t. Assuming they’re not
resolving to join Al Qaeda, or become heroin addicts, or something equally
destructive, I want them to stay focused and disciplined and reach their goal
and also maintain it forever.
Because
if they do it, maybe I’m not a total fool for believing I can, too.
One of
the things I realize about the difficulty human beings have changing their
habits, beliefs, and lives is that it applies to me, too. I’m not deluded. I
understand that the odds apply to me to.
And like everyone else, I occasionally convince
myself that it’s NOT true, that THIS TIME I’m really fed up and that I won’t
give up, won’t back slide, and that I really really can be a whole new person. And,
usually, like everyone else, I lose whatever fire got me motivated in the first
place, and where there’s no fire, there’s no steam, and where there’s no steam,
there’s no motion.
It’s day 64 of my blog, but it’s
day, I don’t know, 300 maybe, on the calendar since the beginning of my
#100DaysofHealth project. I’ve fallen completely off the wagon so many times,
and sometimes for months on end, that it’s tempting to declare the whole thing
a complete and utter failure.
At this moment, it would be fair to
say that I’ve lost most of the gains I made last year: I feel weak, I’m not as
flexible as I was last summer, I’ve put all the weight I lost back on. After
all that determination (not to mention, as I read back through the blog, all that
self-important preaching to readers), I’ve failed to completely change my life,
as I set out to do.
Are you embarrassed for me? Is my
falling back into old habits just more proof to you that no one can really make
big changes, so it’s useless to even try? Is there a little part of you
screaming, “See?? I KNEW you were fooling yourself the whole time!!!”
If so, let me share my OTHER understanding
about human nature.
We do change.
Your beliefs, behaviors, and habits
aren’t the same today, I hope, as they were when you were half your current age.
Your level of understanding about
yourself and the world is probably drastically different.
And I bet your body isn't the same, either.
These changes, good or bad, came
about largely because of the experiences you’ve had, and many of those
experiences were accidental, un-designed, and un-reflected-upon things that
just happened to you.
We do change, but it’s usually not with
any particular intention, and it’s usually over a long period of time.
We do change, but not always
because we want to, and it’s not always in the ways that we want to. We—most human
beings—just sort of get carried along in the raging river of time, occasionally
tossed on the rapids or swept over a waterfall, until we’re dumped into the
ocean of oblivion at the end of our lives.
Don’t feel sorry for, or be embarrassed
for, me or anyone else who occasionally grabs a rudder and tries to get some
control over the journey. Yes, it’s probably futile, and yes, it’s exhausting,
and yes, at some point it’s easier just to let go and go back to floating.
But like any exercise, the effort or
wrestling that rudder can be strengthening in itself.
By grabbing hold of it and then
letting go, I learned a bunch of things:
1.
That working out sucks, but being strong rocks
in so many ways I can’t even tell you, but probably will in a future blog post
2.
That eating junk food always seems like it will make
me feel better in the moment, but it really doesn’t
3.
That, by some mysterious alchemy that I don’t
understand, exercise makes me calmer, nicer, more patient, that I ‘really am’.
4.
That, all in all, I really like being in shape a
lot better than I like being out of shape. If only it were easier to achieve and
maintain that shape.
Here’s what I think: trying and
failing and trying again is how life works. We hate the failing part—I hate the failing part,--but if
we don’t change on purpose, we’ll change accidentally, and that’s worse.
So if it takes me 400, or 600, or
1000 calendar days to ‘succeed’ at focusing on my health for 100 days, so be
it. I'll change over those days no matter what. I'd rather TRY to control those changes, even if I fail utterly and completely.
Gotta go now--I have to go to the gym and finish
getting back in shape.
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