Life can sometimes be very much like used (
not-second hand..) chewing gum.
When you stick your gum to the bed post of an evening, though it may still be there in the morning, regardless of the question of flavour, it will almost certainly have hardened somewhat!
What do you mean; you don’t stick your chewing gum to your bed post,
doesn't everybody?? Next thing, you’ll be telling me you get out of the bath to have a wee!
Anyway, like the chewing gum, some things in life get harder the longer you leave them. This Blog is one of those things.
Like most things I do, I start with huge and unbounded (
sometimes almost evangelical) zeal and make great fantastical (
mental) plans of what I intend to achieve in the future. I am not so ashamed of this as a 'fantastic' methodology of life, as there are doubtlessly many worse things I could be doing. The longer I leave it between posts though, the harder I find it to ‘get back on the horse’.
At times like these (
there have been too many) I so often feel, like now, that I have let myself and others down – I feel depressed, deflated and also oh so slightly embarrassed when the ‘cold light of day’ of reality shows my great ideas and grandiose plans to be heroically out of reach. So often they have stalled through either a debilitating lack of self-belief or an equally chronic loss of primary focus. I am also embarrassed, to be frank, at my rather pathetic inability to confront problems and my penchant for looking the other way and pretending nothing is going on. I am also acutely worried about how people view me (
though I regularly deny this) – not entirely though vanity but rather I have extremely high expectations for myself, and when I fail to reach these dizzy heights my
black dog arrives snarling away like before!
I am sure if I was losing 2-3 pounds a week still I would be posting daily and rambling about all sorts of rubbish. The question for me is that am I unhappy because I am not losing weight or am I not losing weight because I am unhappy. This conundrum is a recurring one and I think I have answered my question many times before.
I
MUST be happy to lose weight – and happiness comes from positive thought… so start thinking positive!
As a consequence of this unspecific
‘black dog’ episode, I have clearly neglected the development of the weight loss challenge, and more importantly to me I have neglected the regular contributors to the Blog including all those of you who kindly entered the challenge.
You all deserve better, and I apologise to you
all.
I sadly have no real excuse for this, no obscure references to ‘personal problems that I don’t want to discuss’, no mental demons that torture me at night.
I just stuck the chewing gum on the post one night and now I find myself here….
I now realise that I created this Blog only in part to assist my weight loss journey. To a greater or lesser extent I also created this Blog for purely selfless reasons of aggrandisement. I wanted to show the world how clever I am and have the thoughts of Chairman
FatBloke published in little red books across the globe. I only slightly exaggerate for comic effect – I know now that I need to reign in my expectations for this project and pick myself up and get on with it.
The primary focus for this Blog should be and
WILL BE to encourage myself and others to live longer through better health and spiritual
well being.
Whilst writing this post, I am reminded of some truly inspirational words. So many times, the word ‘inspirational’ is extravagantly attached to words, images or sounds that patently are no such thing but this, I hope you will agree, is the ‘real deal’.
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt
We as human beings are more complex and diverse as possible anything else in the known universe and we all deal with things differently. Tempting though it is to dream of being a simple ‘dumb’ animal, our friends in the animal kingdom are born without the awesome gift of cognitive thought. Cognitive thought is a twin-edged sword though…as I clearly think too much on occasion!
I have set off down a road to enlightenment using a combination of mental and physical challenges. Changes in the way I relate to food &
exercise my body along with changes in my cognitive thought process, will hopefully combine to be a new way of living my life.
This fairly major bump in the road appears to be the first
un-navigable obstacle in the journey – an obstacle maybe in my own mind, but an obstacle nevertheless. I believe that it stems from my long held belief that I have consistently under achieved in my life.
It should be understood that I do not mean under-achievement in the most conventional sense. I have a very highly paid job, I have a warm and loving family; I live an extremely comfortable and secure life. If
Maslow were to use his pyramid to determine my position I’m a long way off the ground! But am I truly happy? Define happy for a start...!
I feel I have under-achieved in a spiritual and human sense. To judge me in the modern currency of material things, I am as rich as Solomon compared to literally billions of others in the world. But spiritually and emotionally, I feel not exactly bankrupt, but certainly short a bob or two! The older I get, the more things are becoming clear to me. I have spent too long
concentrating on the
what instead of the
why.
Anyway, as Teddy so eloquently put it above, it’s time for me to get back in the arena…
As a reminder of just how lucky I really am, this is a
photograph I took outside our house a couple of weeks ago. I need to look at these more often...
I hope everyone is well and thank you if you have commented recently and my apologies for my lack of reply - I will try to do MUCH better in the future.
And on that note, I leave you with this question…
‘If tin whistles are made of tin, what do they make fog horns out of?’
