On Perspective
(Note: The following has been brought over from one of my Facebook posts.)
I used to obsess about my fitness goals; would obsess about getting to the gym; obsess over when I would eat, and what I would eat, and who I would be eating with; would they ask about what I was eating, or wasn’t eating, and why. Anybody who’s ever been hardcore into fitness, especially anybody with a background like mine—that’s to say, an expert by experience in obsessive compulsive behavior, just a wee bit neurotic, anxious, etc.—is likely to have run into this. It isn’t fun. It isn’t productive. And it’s certainly not healthy.
This is why I seem to annoy some of my more single-minded fitness followers when I start talking about all these other non-fitness things—particularly, God forbid, spiritual and religious things. I just discussed this twice on my podcast, once with Steph Gaudreau, and once with Steve Grunow—about how fitness and nutrition so often don’t solve all the problems we think they’re going to. They may help for a while, but there always comes a point where we need to go deeper. Often much deeper.
Religion, by the way, is just ultimate commitment. Which means we all have one, even if our religion is atheism, which, for many years, mine was. But something I’ve learned is that some things make for a better ultimate commitment than others. Fitness is not a great ultimate commitment. Neither, as it happens, are politics. But faith and spirituality are pretty good ultimate commitments, and they’re all something I missed out on for a very long time, which is probably in no small part why I was so mixed up. I just never had the right orientation, and so I’d obsess and exhaust literally everything that I thought could make me happy—and I would stroke it, and massage it, and pet it, channeling my inner Tommy Boy, until it was dead. In fact, even the things that solved some problems initially (like being overweight, or not having any money) when driven to the extreme—when adopted as my ultimate commitment—quickly became sources of much distress.
This is a misstep I try to warn people of. I don’t want people to make the same mistakes I did. I don’t want people to think fitness—now look, I’ve still got a six pack. (Go on Insta, you’ll see!) so before anybody accuses me of making excuses for why I’ve let myself go, I haven’t; that’s not what this is about. My enthusiasm for fitness is as high as ever, only now it’s a—but here, let me just get in with the point I was trying to make. Please don’t interrupt me again.
The goal of everything I do now—everything I write, everything I talk about—is Generalism: Be good to great at many things, even if you aren’t the best at everyone. But also have some sense of priority in life—try to understand the things that matter most, and make sure your actions and behaviors and beliefs align with these priorities. (“Relationship” has got to be at the top of that list: Not only with God, but with yourself, and everyone else. It just *has* to be.)
All of this, of course, starts by differentiating between wants and needs, by realizing that things aren’t good just because you desire them. Rather, some things are really good, and we all probably have to go through some sort of re-alignment process, so we desire the things that’ll actually nourish us. Sometimes, this might mean we have to fake it until we make it. Spirituality, for me, was a lot like eating vegetables. I had to keep at it a while until it became something I actually enjoyed. Either way, I was getting my vitamins in, even if I made funny faces as I choked certain things down.
We all just want to be happy. In fact, there is no action we take in which we don’t think that action will, in some way, eventually, make us happier. The question, ultimately, is: Will this action *actually* make me happy? Am I pursuing the right things? And, is this something that I can continue to pursue and that will always fill me up by doing so? Or am I going to hit a wall at some point? (For example, placing your “happiness” in a certain body fat percentage, or calorie count. Probably a losing game.)
I wish I would have been pressed with this sooner. Because then I might have realized that counting every single carb on my plate was a relatively fruitless enterprise. (I mean that both literally and metaphorically.) But nevertheless, here we are: I’ve gone through a great deal of realignment these past couple of years, attempting to shift my desires away from all the things I thought I wanted, and point them toward all the things I actually need. This hasn’t been easy. And I’m still messing up a lot. But life has never had more meaning for me than it does right now.
That’s why you hear me talking about these other various, little things on my podcast and my blog and Youtube channel, here and there. I haven’t put fitness aside. I’ve put fitness in perspective.
– Pat