Clear

Spring cleaning is a state of mind, at least in my life, and I often get into it in August.  It may be a remnant of all those years of prepping for another school year, for myself or my kids.  As I am sweeping out the literal dust bunnies, here are some other things we might want to consider clearing out:

• Stuff that doesn’t fit.  Clothes, sure, because who really needs a bunch of stuff making us feel bad that it’s too small or trying to make us feel like we might need that larger size again when we fail?  But maybe we can sweep out the sense that our bodies are not amazing just the way they are, carrying on all their millions of chemical reactions, moving us from place to place, holding all our love and joy and laughter.  Maybe we have a few old attitudes lying around that are holding us back—do we really need to think we are bad at all exercise just because we dropped a fly ball back in fourth grade?

• The fourth one.  Maybe we need one family gredunza and a spare and an emergency one, but really, we don’t need more than that.  This goes for sports equipment, cooking utensils, and helpings of peach cobbler.  Also office supplies, which seem to multiply while we are not looking.

• Heavy stuff.  This is where we decide that we really do want to get rid of that extra five (or more) pounds we’ve been schlepping around all this time.  And maybe the sweater from an old flame, that ugly vase that belonged to Great Aunt Matilda, and the photo from the birthday that makes us look like we’re possessed.

• The drugs.  No, not the cold medicine, unless it has expired.  I’m talking about that stash of M&Ms we turn to on bad days, or the obsessive checking of email/Facebook/whatever, or that reality show/cop show/sitcom that suddenly sucks up a week’s worth of evenings.  We might not need them anymore.

It can be scary to clear out space.  We might not know what, if anything, is going to fill the new emptiness.  Maybe we’ll like having an airier environment.  Maybe we’ll discover a new enthusiasm or hobby or skill now that we have more room.  In any case, it will be an adventure.

Maybe not YET...

Somehow I know a lot of teachers, both the kind that are professional and the kind that enrich us all over a cup of coffee regardless of what they do for a living (not that the professionals don’t enrich our lives over coffee too!).  I think this is why I see so much stuff about the growth mindset.  My summary of the growth mindset is that we understand that we are malleable creatures who can learn and change; this means that we are not limited by our faults or talents, but by our willingness to do the work.  We may not be good at something yet, but we can practice and improve.

The implications for this, in a fitness context, can be transformative.  When we understand that we are learning, we can be a little more patient with ourselves as we make mistakes and a little less critical when we don’t do something perfectly the first or twenty-third time.  We start where we are and we celebrate improvement.  Maybe we even focus a little less on the arriving part of the experience and pay attention to where we are right now on the journey.  We also get to have a lot more celebration as we master little bits of the skills we want.

So maybe we are not as strong/flexible/enduring/coordinated as we’d like to be today.  We are doing the work faithfully, learning from our mistakes and setbacks, and pressing on in our awesomeness to even more awesomeness.

We can do this.

Three views...

 “All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass.  At last he said ‘You’re travelling the wrong way,’ and shut up the window and went away.”  Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 3

What do Alice’s adventures have to do with fitness?  Many things, actually, but I will confine myself to what the Guard says in this instance.  Fitness is something that happens on many scales (yes, even that one we weigh ourselves on…) and is best served when we consider all of them.

How we perform various exercises, how we cook our dinner, and how we feel in the moment are the microscope level.  We need this kind of detail to refine our choices.  However, if all we did was focus on form and vegetables, we would not get all that far.  We need the opera glass scale to build a workout or an eating plan.  We have to understand how a particular exercise or food fits into a larger system because even the most beautiful squat and the largest quantity of leafy greens is not going to make health all alone.  The telescope view has two purposes:  one is to help us realize what our goals are (stars, here we come!) and to keep the other stuff in perspective (no, one cookie is not the end of the universe.).

What we want to do is decide where we want to go, make a plan to get there, and then work on the details:  telescope, opera glass, microscope.