Choices

     "I'd spent many months trying to get my arms around the various strands of my life--work, family, health, sanity--as each spiraled away from me in every possible direction.  Now I was confronting something appealingly binary.

    " I was going to either get out of bed in the morning or roll over and go back to sleep.  I was going to put on my shoes and go running, or I was going to eat bagels and read the sports section.  I was going to stretch, or I was going to continue to hobble down the street with swollen calves and climb steps like my grandfather.  I was going to change my patterns, or I wasn't....I would finish the New York Marathon, or I wouldn't.  It wasn't a process that would be dictated, shaped, or judged by the subjective whims of others.  I would be the only one who controlled the outcome."

Axelrod, Jim. In the Long Run: A Father, a Son, and                  Unintentional Lessons in Happiness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. 206.

Let me ask you something.

How many times have I written about some new insight? Some new way of thinking that was going to change how I approached my health?  How many times have I doubted myself? Believed I was not strong enough?  How many times have I been so excited about successes, only to be devastated by perceived failures?

And still, the simplest insights allude me:

I have a choice.  I can either do, or not do. And that freedom to choose is the single most powerful tool I have, that any of us have.

I can either choose to eat well, or I can choose to eat junk.  And neither choice is wrong, so long as I understand it is only a single, solitary choice.  That one "bad" choice does not inevitably lead to another "bad" choice. The next day...no, the next moment is another chance to choose again. 


Which leads me to....

I've never liked the phrase "have faith in yourself."  Why the hell would I do that?  I know the darkness inside.  I know the questions and the fears and the words in my head telling me that I will not succeed.  How can I have faith against all that I know about myself?

This morning, while trying to mold a post around the above quote, a curious phrase entered my thoughts.  "Take a leap of faith in yourself, Kevin."  I am beginning to understand faith isn't something one can have.  To have is to know.  To have is to be certain.  To have is to stop not having.  But one can continuously take that leap.  Forever choosing to act and be comfortable with never having. 

I can either choose to take that leap. Or I can stay where I'm at, on this side of belief.  And every living moment, I get to make that choice again.

And the beauty of it is that it's mine to make.  All mine.  It is, as Mr. Axlerod said, appealingly binary.  This is the control that has alluded me, spoken of in many posts but never believed was real.  And unless I choose to take that leap every moment side by side with all my other choices, I never will find that elusive power. 

Right now, I am choosing to take that leap. Tomorrow, I may not.  But I suspect that this isn't a choice you make once.  This is a choice I will need to practice.