Restarting

In a few days January, the month of resolutions, will arrive. As I reflect on some of the goals I set in 2013, I wonder if I set worth while goals. One of those goals, increase my muscle mass (while keeping my fat mass to a minimum), defines many generic goals. My body weight and composition has changed over the years; I no longer have the pressure of a sport to endless increase my size, speed and strength. I know what it feels like to be bigger, faster and stronger. I also know what it feels like to be out of shape, to rebuild and consequently remember what physical motion feels like. Exercising regularly makes fitness fun and enjoyable. Coming off a month of not doing much feels like I can hardly move. Motivation drops to zero, at which point we ask ourselves the all important question, "Why am I doing this?"

How do we honestly answer this question? I look inside. Inside my head, inside my heart, inside my life. Why do I pursue fitness? I need to know how I define fitness before I can answer why I do it. Fitness is the sum total of activities I practice in order to be healthy. Great, that sounds like it came out of a dictionary. Regardless of my definitions origin, I now need to define what I consider healthy.

This creates a problem. What is health? I see numerous advertisements for health, and as I look at the ads I often find myself thinking, "that doesn't look like health." Either the image is too perfect, photo-shopped or makes subliminal claims about how it will enhance my non-existent sex life, which I am currently happy with. As I ponder why advertising focuses so much on sex appeal, it makes me wonder if sexy equals healthy. To which my honest answer is no. Why? because I know many people who are healthy, but not considered sexy. Some forms of fitness are very sexy, especially when done in hot and sweaty environments while wearing curve caressing clothing. Or are they? When we really sit down and think about it, most sports and exercise activities are not sexy in the nit and grit of daily practice. We glam up competition, taking lots of photos that we then photo-shop, but practice isn't advertisement worthy material. It's too real, authentic and human. Which makes me ask another question, "Why do we focus so much on the end result and not how we arrive there?"

When we think about end results, temptations arise. Temptations to cut corners, take enhancers, quit and try too hard. I believe quitting, trying to hard, cutting corners and taking enhancers all fall into the same category. The category of I'll never get there and I won't get there fast enough. To which my response is, "What's the rush?" Why do we worry and try to change too quickly?

One thing I know about fitness, it takes time to develop, and the more we develop fitness the more time we have. Fitness is an anti-ager, unless we work to hard, then it accelerates aging; it creates dis-ease and dis-comfort. So if fitness is something best taken slow, letting it develop over time, then shouldn't we approach health the same way?

Approaching health requires a steady and consistent pace. On this journey we discover our capabilities, limits and hindrances. One of my personal limitations, attaining goals through the nit and grit of practice while keeping my body healthy, means I won't do more exercise if my body hurts. Pushing my body into the hurt zone is easy, staying out of it while pursuing my goals is not. The answer to gauging the health and pain balance? Community. The deeper the community I find myself in, the easier I find a balance between health and pain. I also find it more motivating to work out when I have friends to work out beside me.

Which then creates a conundrum. Should we all go seeking this mythical stronger community? Or should we build one where we are? And how do we build deep community? My answer to our first question, "Why am I doing this?" is a communal one. We do specific activities because our communities accept them. Which is a logic circle. We do activities because they are okay and accepted, and they are okay and accepted because we do them. So how do we introduce something new into a community?

Someone, at some point has to try something new, either by themselves or with a group of friends. We positively and negatively influence each other to try new activities. Why? Because we want out of our mindless circling. We either try to keep it all the same, and thus all agree nothing is wrong because we agree nothing is wrong, or we admit something is wrong and try to change.

What changes first? The individual or the environment? I can't give you a straight answer because my mind sees a conflict with this statement. Why does the individual need to change before the environment does? As soon as someone chooses to act differently, those actions spill out into our environment, and thus make us consider our own actions. Consider my above statements about my sex life. I mentioned something about the way I live, why did you react negatively or positively to my statement? We are communally wired, and we desire our community of influences to be unified. We dislike dis-unity. It starts to feel like dis-comfort, then we label it a dis-ease and then we try to eradicate it. Which makes me stop and ask, "Why are we trying to eradicate people?" or my preferred way of asking this, "Why are we trying to eradicate human behavior?" or simply "Why don't we like being human?"

I believe there is something deeply wired into us that longs for our behaviors to be set right. Not eradicate the ways in which we feel, move and healthfully change, but to satisfy our desire for wholeness. Our desire to be united internally and with those around us. I believe these fundamental questions lies at the core of our common experiences. How do we come together? Can we stay together? I believe these are the essentials of building health.

At the core of my health is my spiritual connection to God, even though it often gets challenged, I practice less often then I should, and like many others I struggle to know what 'following God' means. Part of my journey is asking questions, and having open thoughts for others to see. Not because I want to hammer someone into my position, because that violates my definition of health (and I believe following God should be practiced healthily). But because I see a decline in my world of asking questions about God. I see a rise in judgment toward the religious. I see a rise in judgment towards sexuality. And in the midst of rising tides with emotions rising high I want to ask a very small question, "What are we doing to each other?"

As I ask this question I look 'up'. I don't understand why we are so bent on making each other into a perfect image, when our perfect images aren't healthy. I don't understand our obsession with wanting everyone to move and think like 'I' do. The concept makes me want to vomit. I fervently don't want a bunch of people to be like me, but I desperately want community with at least a few like-minded people. And I want that community to be okay with asking questions about God, that as we consider all the logical ways in which we might be able to change our world, we also consider that logic isn't the answer. Perhaps there is more to life than measurable changes and paces. Perhaps life is full of seasons of growth, harvest and decay, which means its okay if our weight doesn't measure the same every day. And perhaps when we think about health we shouldn't be thinking in measurements, but should be considering our qualities and philosophies on life.