A Million Miles (On an elliptical) In A Thousand Years (In Irving Gym)

Donald Miller asserts that a story is life with all the boring parts cut out. The logical next step, then, is that life is a story or series of stories with a whole lot of boring stuff thrown in. Part of my whole philosophy in this journey of life change is to not set goals, but rather live stories. The story I’m trying to live out is one of a hero setting out to conquer past habits in order to become the best version of himself he can in order to make the lives of everyone around him better. Hardly Pocahontas, I know, but it’s what I’ve got going right now.

I know there’s a whole bunch of “hero’s journey” stuff you could tie into the way I want to live. Hercules traveling to complete the task of retrieving the Golden Apple, except I’m the opposite of Hercules and the Golden Apple is an actual apple to eat for breakfast every day. Should this be a crusade? I don’t know, because it doesn’t have a defined end. One doesn’t just reach “healthiness” and stay there passively like a plateau. It’s more like climbing a mountain, except when you get to the top you have to fight to stay there because of a constant gust trying to knock you back down to the bottom. It isn’t like I’m just going to go back to the way I was once I reach my “magic number”, right? The point is to build the habits I need to live a healthy life, which will lead to reaching the “magic numbers” I dangle in front of myself like pinatas.

That’s part of the boring parts they cut out of a life to make a story: habit-making. To (again) paraphrase Miller, no one would go to a movie and watch the hero wake up every morning and argue about what to have for breakfast, oatmeal or Bran Flakes. It could be well-acted and have more special effects than What Dreams May Come, but it’s still a story about oatmeal and exercise bikes.

Yeah, it’s kind of a crappy story, and not very original, but it’s my story. I have so much to live for and so much I can do with my life, but I need to prove to myself and the world that I can pull it off.  It’s a social truth we live in that people that are in shape are more trusted than people out of shape.

I’m not entirely sure why I put off my own health as long as I did. I have had a nasty trait of considering myself less important than the people around me. The butler’s mentality, I guess. I live to work for others and make others happy. The joy I get when I do something people need done and I get acknowledged for it is palpable. So I focused on that for a while – eating out of my car while I work, grabbing fast food on my way to campus, eating in the Atrium so I can finish a project for some organization, etc. That, combined with a general disdain for exercise dating back to elementary school, led to the nice even spare tire currently residing around my midsection.

I finally had enough this past Christmas. I had so much good happen to me personally that I felt divine motivation to completely change my lifestyle. I was wasting all the blessings I had been given and it all came to a head when I looked in a mirror and, for the first time, felt the overwhelming desire to change everything about what I saw on the outside.

That is my story – the Hero who wants something and overcomes conflict to attain it. Only in this case, it’s the fat kid who wants to be skinny and overcomes years of bad habits to attain fitness.