June 18th, 2012: So the weekend’s over, race day has come and gone, and now it’s back to the grind. I did exercise yesterday, but I also fucking over-ate again. This is getting a little frightening. One screw-up a month I can live with, two in one week makes me think I’m losing my grasp. When I feel like I’m losing my grasp, it makes me feel stressed and guilty. When I feel stressed and guilty, it makes me want to turn to food as my drug to combat these feelings of stress and guilt. And around and around we go again.
I gained a pound back to 259.
We ate sushi last night. Way too much of it. Everybody always says sushi is healthy, well so is salad, but I’ve seen fat cattle. You can get fat on anything, and so the world “healthy” needs qualifiers. I also drank like 8 non-alcoholic beers (I’m the only asshole in this town who can drink enough “non-alcoholic” beers to catch a buzz), and had a piece of amazing chocolate cake, a very large piece. And if you think I stopped eating after we left the restaurant, you would be mistaken.
In general, the program opens the door for success to breed success, but it also preaches that today is another new day, and one of the fundamental tenets of the program is to allow for a new day to be a blank slate – and it should follow the statistical principle of independent events. What I did yesterday I cannot allow to affect me today. Since it’s my life, I can pick and choose what I want to carry over from yesterday if I maintain the belief, the concentration, and the overall mental strength to filter my thoughts.
So I’m going back into the New York Groove on this Monday. Yep, it’s neat that we did the half-marathon, not quite as neat that I didn’t do for my diet what the program told me I was supposed to do. Celebrate one, learn from the other, move on.
June 18th, 2020: Sometimes I’m more satisfied with how I handled a life event than I am about the final result of that event.
This is the line from my favorite poem, “If” by Rudyard Kipling that helps me describe what I mean by that last sentence:
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…”
To me, this means that I should be able to demonstrate grace under any circumstance. I’ve written about it many times before, and it first materialized, or became apparent to me, in 1993 when I witnessed experienced firefighters fighting fire, and to me it looked like ice-water ran through their veins. All hell could break loose around them and these people didn’t even appear to be more spun up than if they were watching a bird land in the tree in the backyard.
So I’ve tried to learn to at least pretend to remain calm when the literal and metaphorical bullets are whizzing past me. I’ve also tried to at least pretend to remain stoic when I’ve been given devastating news, and tried to spin rather dumpy situations into just more funny lifetime stories. What more can ya do? It’s all part of the fight. I would always prefer to be remembered not for successes or failures, but how I presented as a man when presented with either, if that makes sense. It’s certainly how I think of my heroes – not for what the final outcome of their situations, but how they performed during the situation. Hope this isn’t too confusing.
Remember to keep the fire above you in real life, and figuratively within you. Be especially careful when there’s unburned fuel between you and the main fire, always know where your safety zones are, and maintain solid escape routes to those safety zones. Don’t be afraid to fight, but more importantly, don’t forget to smile while you’re fighting, and to pause once in awhile to avoid taking yourself so damn seriously.
