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In class last night we did a theological reflection exercise on a poem by a French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. What I immediately noticed about it was not only the fact that this piece of writing spoke personally to me, it also describes quite well what I’ve seen as a weight-loss facilitator. Namely, an impatience to reach our destination immediately!
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.
In this poem he also writes that you “cannot be today….what time will make you tomorrow.” Or to put it another way, if you are in the process of losing weight and reaching for a specific goal – it ain’t gonna happen today. Period.
What I find most helpful about this is the reminder that the journey itself is the purpose of what we’re doing. So in changing healthy eating and exercising habits, the reward is in the change itself, even if our purpose over the long run is to lose weight. It doesn’t diminish the value of the long-run goal by any means. But I think what we need to know is that when we get there, we’re not “done.”
In the meeting I attended today, two members separately mentioned losing over fifty pounds, and then “going back to old ways” and gaining it all back. Each explained that it was a sense of relief and exhaustion that led them to stop plugging away at it. The lesson being, don’t do anything to lose weight that you’re not willing to keep up for maintaining your loss.
In fact, one of the women, who had just RE-lost the fifty pounds to reach her goal, said that this time she is going to begin exercising as a maintenance practice. She definitely sounded “older and wiser!”
In my own life, I’m on tenterhooks about a few big changes and I feel “impatient to reach the end without delay.” But I have no control over the ultimate outcomes of these things, and so I am most definitely “passing through some states of instability.”
So I can do nothing less than take Teilhard’s sage advice: “Above all, trust in the slow work of God.”
Slow, indeed.
It’s always a fact that we always want tom reach our goals as early as possible but it is not possible at all. We have to make regular efforts if we want to reach our goals. The efforts should be satisfying the goal which we want to achieve.
Comment by Angie 03.14.08 @ 1:23 am