Old Ideas

I have so many.  They take their toll on me depending on what I’m experiencing emotionally, and in direct proportion my willingness to have a full experience.  Recently, someone and I were talking about the old idea of “suffering”.  The idea that things have to be hard in order for the reward to be valid.  The idea that things have to induce some kind of unnerving, some kind of frustration,  or some kind of inner turmoil in order for the fruit the other side bears to be sweet.

Fuck that thinking.  It is worn out, abused, and useless.  I have been experiencing this a lot, this idea around my professional life.  I have never had a career path as sweet as the one I have now, with big company benefits and PTO, opportunity and support.  I have never been an investment to someone, receiving training constantly and support in every way imaginable.  I have never had the flexibility to work both from home and from an office, my results speaking for the trust I always had to earn.  This new idea of working in a way that suits me and my lifestyle is foreign, and aggitates the old story.  Some days it is a grind, while other days it feels too easy, too flexible, and too soft.  The old story around work is that I’m never working hard enough unless I am in my car constantly, have a headache, or my eyes are burning from staring at a bunch of numbers I can’t figure out how to compute.  The new story is that I am always being validated by my peers, my manager, and my results, and that it doesn’t have to be awful to be a success. If you are doing what you are supposed to be doing, it will be hard but it can also be fun and flexible. Right? 

The next story is about my training and fitness.  The old story writes that if I am not sore, if I am not hurt, or if I am not following somebody else’s templated piece of paper to a T, then I am not doing it right.  Then I am not fit.  Then I am not going to achieve success in the goals I have set out for myself.  This week’s examples are that my body woke up on Tuesday unwilling to run.  So instead of slaving inside on a treadmill walking incline for 60 minutes, I opted to throw my ruck on and take Bam into the woods for a good old fashioned hike.  My mind played the old and very familiar “this is not hard enough”.  “Your heart rate isn’t high enough”.  “You aren’t suffering enough”.  “You are not enough”.  But the new story acts (not thinks) that I have honored my body and by most people’s standards, rucking for an hour in the woods on terrain with some hills is plenty of “work”.  I am enjoying this weather and my dog and finally, halfway through, just turned the god forsaken heart monitor off so I could actually appreciate that I have trails in my backyard and how beautiful they are.  The next day then leant itself to a restored body, able to run up and down some hills at a decent clip outside instead of on a treadmill – another old story.  If you had a plan and put the plan on paper, that exact plan with those precise details must be executed.  New story acts that this is not true.  I cannot tell you the bliss I felt from my rested and happy body and the bliss I carried watching Bam do whatever she wanted (hiding behind trees from having to run up another hill) with her mom.  This is living, not doing.  The new story is alive.  The new story acts and breathes and ebbs and flows.  Kind of like life.  Life is not static.  Life is not structured. The more we fight its natural curves and waxes and wanes, the more we suffer.  At least I do.

Next up: food.  Being in recovery from food is hard.  You cannot eliminate food, or a body, ever.  You can eliminate alcohol and drugs.  I’m not saying that alcoholism or drug addiction are easy to escape, but I am saying that you don’t have to live with those substances should you choose not to.  This is not true with food.  Food is a necessity to live.  Food is a required part of life, no matter what form you ingest it.  You have a body – it houses the pieces necessary to live this life, and can also be your vessel to experience what God created.  To be in recovery from a substance that you must have a relationship with every day, multiple times a day, can be fucking hard.  The old story: if I am not deprived, starved, obsessed or counting, then I must not be doing it right.  If I am not following (again) somebody else’s piece of paper to a T every single meal, every single day, then I am not doing right.  I am not enough. 

Most of the time, I eat what my nutritionist has prescribed me to eat.  It is not plain, it is not boring, and it is not rigid.  In fact, I am eating the most flexibly I have ever eaten in my entire life on a consistent basis, avoiding foods that don’t work for me, and doing my best to enjoy the rest that there is to offer.  But sometimes, I still want food to make me feel better.  I still want food to comfort me, to seduce me, to sedate me, and to satisfy me.  And sometimes, it does and sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes, I go back for more.  Sometimes, I eat more than I need.  Sometimes, I get in my head about it and torment myself with the adage that I know better, therefore should somehow be better.  I should be perfect.

The new story that I am learning, one meal at a time, is that perfectionism is a trap.  Just like I trust God to handle all of the people in my life and grant me endless opportunities to communicate with them better, I can trust that I will continue to receive countless opportunities to eat well and find other ways of nurturing and satisfaction and love.  I can trust that I will continue to receive opportunities to see myself the way that others see me, and to want to see myself as God sees me.

We are all seeking the same things: love, comfort, empathy, connection.  Many of us can find it in others, while some of us take a few detours before we realize that not only has the very thing we’ve been wanting all along been inside of us, that it is often just beyond the reach of our very fingertips.  It is not in the food.  It is not in the alcohol.  It is not in the mall.  It is right here, inside, right now. 

It doesn’t mean that we won’t detour again, but it certainly means that we are enough even when we do.