So, Ok. Out of the scatter-shot from the parts of my life I wanted to change, I decided on one BB, fitness, because one BB was all I thought I could pick up. In other words, I didn’t think, as yet, that much could be changed.
This was not a new approach for me. I had often felt trapped, defeated, with no way out of the trying circumstances in which I found myself. In fact, this sort of thinking brought me just exactly what I thought about………a trap, and no way out. I was like a canary in a cage…..with the door wide open. He perches in there anyway, out of habitual boundaries and perhaps fear of a new opening, a new wind blowing.
The Mindset
You have already caught onto my mindset, right? Very simple. No belief in myself. I had a choice of believing things could change, or that it was all just impossible. I will admit, I’d made a lot of half-hearted attempts to change my circumstances, but always fell back into my default position, which was familiarity, like the canary in the cage. The problem was, I was 58 years old, and I was getting more desperate every day to change something.
In the past, as soon as the going got tough on changes; such as my having to make definite plans, or confront an issue, I generally didn’t perform. I am not saying that I was a weak sister here. In fact, I was devoting 90% of my energies to simply surviving. I hadn’t much left over for anything else. But, do you see how the canary cage became a hamster cage for me? The hamster revolves and revolves on the little wheel……very busily, but never examines the cage or the cage door.
When I change the way I view the world, the world changes. WakeUpCloud.
And another: If you’re going to create the life you really want and deserve, you’re going to, at the very least, believe it’s possible. If you don’t think it’s possible, it just won’t happen. E.K. Santo
Predictability
Of course, I wanted predictability. I wanted to put the time and effort into, say, the ultimate exercise program, and come up with a great new body! I could be, as all those promotional ads proclaimed: Cancer free with no trace of any chronic disease, as an added bonus! This was how it should work out, if I did the time, right?
Naturally, the planets lined up against me on that one. Uncertainty is the one certainty we all certainly live with. Frankly, the more I clung to the concept of ‘the way my life should be’, or ‘if only I could get my ducks in a row’, the more I seemed to suffer.
Old belief systems
Somehow, it is inculcated into us in childhood, or perhaps a myth we choose to believe, that at some point in our lives we will have solved the puzzle and won the game. At that point we will be free to really enjoy life, without the intrusion of hassles, poverty, war, unhappiness, ill-health, poor conditioning, fat bodies, low energy. We are going to have it all. So, it becomes a depressing disappointment when we hit the back-side of middle age and we’re nowhere near that goal.
Reactions
However, there was a missing piece of the puzzle for me, as there is for a lot of people. The problem was not really my uncertainty, coupled with my anxieties, but my resistance to my fears. I didn’t really need to know my ultimate future, did I? Instead, I needed to change my reaction to all of my continual negative thoughts, and due to those, negative circumstances.
In fact, all I needed to know was myself, and the plans I could make for myself. I could do my best, and let the rest fall into place as it would.
In order to do that, though, I needed to change my thinking, my constant course of thoughts running on alternate platforms. I needed to rein in my thoughts and drive traffic through one channel I could work with, getting fit.