Footsteps of a Fool.

Hope you’ll find me there.

I have to warn that it’s somewhat under construction since the formatting is messed up, but there it is.

If anyone has reached this blog through that, would you mind letting me know what happened? I haven’t been able to access them for days.

While I had been exercising most days (say, 6 out of 7), I started tracking it and making concrete exercise goals because of it. Because I didn’t start writing it down until 03/14, I made a goal of 360 minutes for the month (20 minutes a day average for every day left of the month). Writing it down rather than making a mental note (Yep! Made 20 minutes today!) makes a big difference, I’ve found. I’m consciously striving for an average of 140 a week, and, so far, am exceeding it as an average. If I miss a day, I make sure to exercise extra to make up for it.

I’ve also decided to go to weekly weigh-ins for the board as well. I’m still keeping my original focus, but I think that by participating in the community, it will provide encouragement when I need it the most.

I started the weigh-in process today, and I’ve gained three pounds since 03/05. All things considered (those really really bad weeks), that’s not bad, but clearly, I don’t want to move in that direction.

This morning, I was walking and just so absolutely happy that I woke up at 3 pounds and not 5 or 10 or 20.

I’m moving. I’ve made some important realizations since the beginning of March, and I’m just so, well, blessed.

Last week, I managed 153 (actual) of 140 (goal) minutes.

I’m re-calibrating my week from Friday-Thursday (for work) to a “normal people week” from Monday-Sunday.

That’s about it.

~ Baha’u'llah, The Hidden Words

The Fast officially ended at sunset this evening, and boy oh boy was it a learning process. Far more than last year, and I was far less successful with it this year compared with last year.

I am incredibly foolish at times. Embarrassingly, frighteningly, and utterly foolish. I had this strange month, March, one where absolutely nothing seemed to go right.

Once you get things “all figured out,” it’s supposed to be smooth sailing, right?

Spring Break was last week, and, without a doubt, it was the most disastrous week I’ve had in a long, long time. It was bad-bad, like half-a-gallon-of-blue-bell-ice-cream in 2 days bad. A feat, I might add, that I have NEVER accomplished in all of my days of crazy eating before last week.

Last week, the one that fell after this wonderful, transformative, oh-my-God moment that supposedly changed everything.

It wasn’t bad enough that I did that, though. I broke the Fast. Over and over and in as many different ways as I could possibly count, I broke the Fast. And the level of guilt that I felt over it was incredible, to the point of my wondering why I was doing it in the first place.

Two days went by, and I realized I was eating crap food. Crap, crap food. Four, and I realized that I hadn’t done my morning routine of meditation and exercise in at least three days.

Guilt is such a strange, strange thing.

I have been reading a lot, though, and I realized that I have unceremoniously and unconsciously looking for something to “disprove” the Baha’i Faith. Because one “wrong” word, one wrong fundamental difference, and I could say “Aha!” and walk away from the Baha’i Faith. It was 16 months ago that I had first heard of it, from a person who had asked me what I believed about God.

I stuttered and stammered because, while I had all of these “universal” spiritual ideas, I hadn’t really fleshed them out. And as I talked, and then he explained, I instantly recognized huge points of commonality, and I found myself thinking, “Hmm. You mean other people feel this way, too?”

It was eye-opening for me, and it set me on a path of reading and researching. But here it is the second year of the Fast, one in which, by all outward appearances, I abysmally failed, and I know what I’m doing. (At least for this moment, that is, as always, subject to change at any moment), and I know where I’m headed.

The way I see it, committing to a faith is very much like committing to a marriage. While I’ve explored in the past, I think that to declare your specific path is to show what you’re striving for by means of a commitment.

When I worked Step 3 in January, and willingly and consciously gave my life and my will over to God, I meant it, and I realized that it wasn’t just about food, but I really didn’t understand the scope of what I was doing.

Of course, I’m not sure that I do even at this point, but I’m okay with that.

This is incredibly disjointed, since I’ve been trying to write it over a period of several days, but now I’m going to wind it up.

I do not have Baha’i leanings. I am not “intellectually curious” about Baha’i studies.

I am Baha’i.

And tomorrow is the New Year. And I have my work cut out for me.

Because of my hypothyroidism, I am chronically dehydrated. My ultimate health goal is that, by next year’s Fast, to be in a condition which will allow me to fully and wholly observe it as it was commanded. Weight apparently affects thyroid function, and thyroid function affects, well, just about everything.

I don’t know if it’s directly connected. It’s just sort of a conglomeration of different things I’ve been told my doctors.

I don’t know if it’s even possible. I don’t know what lies between this year and next.

I just know that it’s my goal, and absolutely contingent upon commitment.

Scratch that, I’m definitely a mess today.

Spring Break is here, and I slept in again. I woke up, ate breakfast, and went back to bed, content that I’d observe the Fast again.

Right.

Last year it was “neat” and “nifty” and “challenging.” This year it is is “hard” and “grrr” and “bringing garbage to the surface.”

Which is not to say that it is still not beautiful. I can tell some major stuff is going on, which makes it absolutely necessary.

It just doesn’t make the Fast as fun as it was last year.

I’m not overly emotional or anything, I simply can NOT get moving. Waking up early, (going to bed early the night before is where I get messed up at), and beginning the day the “proper way” makes such a huge difference. Who’d have thought that what was normal behavior for just a couple of months ago (minus a school day), would be “such a mess” today.

My, how the times have changed.

Yesterday, I could excuse it. It was, after all, National Nap Day. I still managed to do what I needed to do.

But today, it’s almost 2 pm and I’m sitting here, stagnant, wondering just why I can’t get my day started.

I re-discovered an old haunt, one which I registered for and even posted a couple of times to, but sort of dropped off the map right around the time I started smoking again. (Hmmm. Oh, what a coincidence!)

It’s 3 Fat Chicks on a Diet. A very, very cool place. I’ve actually linked this blog in my sig there, which means that people I don’t know will see me as I am now, and that prospect scares the ever living crap out of me.

Which is exactly why I had to do it, I suppose.

And of course, that makes me want to walk less than it did yesterday. Which, again, is exactly why I need to do it.

Because, unlike last year, I am committed. And a lot of this “garbage” coming up revolves around fear. Actually, all of it does.

And, unfortunately, keeping commitments wholly is irrelevant of being afraid of them or not.

Which is why I have to do it.

This morning is the first of Spring Break. I woke up early, before sunrise and ate since I’m still Fasting, and decided, with as cold and grey as it was outside, to go back to bed.

It was marvelous. I still have a to-do list a billion miles long. I still haven’t walked this morning. I still haven’t done anything on my to-do list, but I went back to bed.

And, despite all the conditions surrounding it, I did it guilt-free.

I love guilt-free stuff.

Even better, I woke up to a dream that, the more I think about it, the more it motivates me. I was at an apartment building (presumably one I lived in for the dream), and a bunch of people asked me to play softball. I played catcher for their practice. I was out of shape and did horribly. Afterwards we hit the shower, (I taking a shower in all of my clothes since I didn’t have room to take them off — a weird detail, and I’m not sure of that significance), and they asked me if I would be back the next weekend.

Now, when I was a kid, I LOVED softball. It was before fast-pitched was popular, so many years ago. I got the catcher position because no one else wanted it, and, in the end, I loved that position. I was a baseball freak, and I learned how to catch with a softball-version of the baseball catcher’s stance.

I was in great shape. I was physical and active. I felt good. And I loved me some softball. And that would be a great, great, great place to be again.

I’ve been walking now for over a month, consistently (with the exception of a couple of work days and one or two rain days). I think it’s time I added something, even something small, to the exercise regimen.

Walking consistently is making a difference. I like the way my body feels when it’s moving. I like the fact that I can feel the beginnings of muscles in my thighs and calves.

I just want to do more.

So I googled “how to get in shape for softball” and this is what I came up with:

A successful fitness conditioning routine must incorporate some form of aerobic activity – exercise that increases the blood circulation and heart rate for an extended period of time – such as walking, jogging, swimming or jumping rope, and strength training exercises using free weights, machines or resistance bands to help increase bone strength and muscle tone. The American College of Sports Medicine suggests training each muscle group in the arms, legs, and back 2 to 3 times a week with about 48 hours of rest between in order for muscles to repair and grow.

From http://www.athleticscholarships.net/sports-training-softball.htm

Other answers elsewhere in grammar and spelling too obscene to reproduce, it appears that stretching and stomach crunches are good, too. Free weights are good, and reps are more important than actual weight. So is stretching.

Because of my position between worlds right now — so close to graduation with no clue of where I’ll be working — I’m afraid to commit to a gym. I’ve wanted to do yoga classes for a while now, but kept putting them off. Maybe they’ll be a part of my gym package.
But right now, I’ll be stepping up the exercise a bit by adding free weights a couple of times a week to my regimen.

Looks like I’ll need to google that, too. But for now, I need to get walking. My day, so wonderfully started, is beginning to really, really slip away.

Not enough time, not enough energy. Can’t find the right words. Can’t find…whatever.

So soon, eh, and I’m fighting the bullshit. I should have known better.

Right now my excuse is that I don’t know how to flip pictures. Yes, it’s true. When I bought a new laptop late last year, I just haven’t bothered to figure out how to use it too well.

And, for the record, whatever program it uses for pictures doesn’t have a simple “flip” button like my other one did.

These were taken 03-01 at a friend’s party. I was hoping to get some just hanging-out-shots, but when time came that I had to go to work, and I had no pictures taken (which were going to specifically be for the blog), I got desperate.

I love Eileen, but I have to question her photography skills. But, without further disclaimer, I’ll go ahead and post them.

This is the first time I’ve allowed, much less strong-armed friends into taking them, full length body shots of myself since my wedding in 1998.

Unflipped, unedited, unable to be given better lighting, here they are.

And, as you can see, Eileen isn’t too concerned with heads, either:

The closest approximation to my weight at this point is my weight from 03/05, which is 325.2 lbs.

When ink joins a with a pen, then the blank paper

can say something. Rushes and reeds must be woven

to be useful as a mat. If they weren’t interlaced,

the wind would blow them away.

Like that, God paired up

Creatures and gave them friendship.

Rumi, Essential Rumi, trsltd by Coleman Barks

I read over the Part I part, and I realized I went no where near where I meant to with it.

So I’ll try again.

Apparently it takes a really long time for something to slip down between the folds of my psyche. I’m slow like that at times.

One of the big sayings at the Unity church which I attend is “Know that you know that you know.” Which, on an intellectual level, I got. There is a difference, obviously, between intellectually understanding and really, really getting something.

I don’t know the particular moment that I got that I got that I got it, just that I didn’t at one point, and then I did.

There was a particular moment when I realized something absolutely wonderful, though. There was a shining, singular moment when something spectacular and fabulous and utterly wonderful occurred to me. There was a shining, singular moment when I realized something so profoundly simple.

That I didn’t have to be fat anymore.

This is how I knew that I had been healed. Completely, irrevocably healed. Because I didn’t have to be fat anymore.

I think that everything thing we hold onto in our lives serves us, otherwise we wouldn’t hold onto it. Everything from fishing poles to farting friends, there is a purpose for everything in our lives.

I knew why I held on to my fat. Hell, I had anecdotal evidence that it was doing exactly what I wanted it to do. And when it appeared that it wasn’t, it wasn’t keeping a wall between other people and me, I’d gain more because, surely it just wasn’t enough!

And there I was, bless my little heart, completely “over” this “bad thing” eating like a dog any time I’d get hit on. But I was perfectly okay, you know. Perfectly. Healthy, happy, gonna lose weight one day. Nothing to see here, move along.

There is one particular incident that flashes so brightly in my memory that it’s painful to even think about.

I was sitting outside a country-bumpkin store with my friend Melissa’s little boys, in her car while she ran in the store. A guy pulled up next to our car, and he started talking to me.

And I panicked. I couldn’t go anywhere. I had kids with me and their mom was in the store.

They were being rowdy, so I yelled at them. That was bad enough that I yelled, but even as I was doing it, I knew why I was doing it.

He kept talking around the boisterous kids and the yelling chick. Wanted my number, wanted to go out. Blah blah blah.

Which sort of struck me as strange, considering, for all he knew these kids were mine and it was my husband in the store.

But whatever. I told him I wasn’t from around there. “Oh, I’m not, either, but we could have coffee or something.”

I told him I was staying with my girlfriend, and I was on a flight back home tomorrow. “Where you from?” he asked me.

My mind went blank, and I sputtered the first thing I could think of, “Canada.”

I wanted to think of some place cool, Nepal maybe. Nice or something. But I realized that I had no accent.

So I said Canada, and then, God help me, purposely began putting “aboot” in sentences. “What part?” he asked.

“Vancouver, you know, West-side.” Like it was all hip and shit to say aboot and be West-side V-town.

Then Melissa came out, and we drove away with the poor Georgia boy probably wondering what the hell just happened.

I don’t remember what we had for dinner that night, but there was a lot of ice cream. A LOT. Because making up silly stories wasn’t enough, apparently. Someone, despite my best intentions, had asked me out, and I panicked.

And that was my life. In different scenarios, in different ways and different reactions, that was my life.

And looking back, I get how much I valued disconnection. I’m not quite certain the bridge between possible sexual partners and friends, but I noticed that I had very few close friends, and mostly ones that I had known for years because I wasn’t willing to really make any new ones.

I was afraid, sure. Being truly friendly was terrifying in that unknown, intangible way. Because then people might start having expectations. And they may start relying on me. And then, God help me, I just might have to step up and be responsible.

And I’m going off on another tangent again, but I do that.

When I realized I didn’t have to be fat anymore, everything changed. Actually, I think it changed before that, but that was the moment that I got it. And I thought it had to do with sex and relationships and things like that, which would have been miraculous enough, but it is proving to be so far encompassing that I think I’ll be discovering things in new ways for a long, long time to come. But I think at the core of it is that I no longer value disconnection. Connection is vital to me in regards to anything I interact with, be it books, people, animals, God, whatever.

And learning to live as someone vitally connected to her life in all facets seems to be my big, new fabulous adventure. And I’m giddy, giddy like a kid on Christmas Eve giddy, although it is almost every single day of my life. And it is big. And new. And fabulous.

At its very core, reconnection is the nature of my miracle. I didn’t have anything taken away, although I thought I had. I didn’t have anything purged, covered up, or removed. I simply had everything connected.

And I am so very, very, very grateful.

We have commanded you to pray and fast from the beginning of maturity; this is ordained by God, your Lord and the Lord of your forefathers. He hath exempted from this those who are weak from illness or age, as a bounty from His Presence, and He is the Forgiving, the Generous.

Baha’u'llah, The Kitab-i-Aqdas

It’s that time of the month again! This time, I’ve discovered 7.6 lbs gone this month, bringing my total gone to 10.2 lbs.

Thank God. Literally.

And something I just said two days ago: “And my second day into this particular commitment is way too early to go and break it.”

It wasn’t about the Fast, but it could have been.

Monday, I had a horrible day. My energy crashed about 3 pm, and I couldn’t get it back. I napped. I broke the Fast for coffee (very much trying to stay away from food for it), and I finally ended up eating, but nothing helped.

The next morning, I’m bright and shiny and happy, happy, happy to be eating breakfast before sunrise.

But something happened, and I broke it again. And again, and, if I recall correctly, once more again.

Oh, God and His mysterious ways again.

I was heart-sick from the thought of having broken the Fast. I was sad, I was angry, I was a lot of things.

I was very, very distraught.

When I had broken it “accidentally” last year, I found myself thinking, “Ok, so it happened. I have to pay attention to that so it doesn’t happen again.”

I was disappointed, but I wasn’t heart-broken.

When I felt like I needed to end it early because I *was* feeling continually physically sick, I was disappointed, but I wasn’t heart-broken.

On Monday and Tuesday I was heartbroken. In fact, this morning, I woke up and I was still heart-broken about it.

Fortunately for me, I had met someone who, either intentionally or unintentionally, put everything into perspective for me. He asked me one simple question. “Do you consider yourself Baha’i?”

My standard answer is “No. I’m an interested observer. I have Baha’i leanings. I’m < whatever it was I called myself when I felt I was called to observe the Fast last year >. But, no, I’m not a Baha’i.”

This morning, I was trying to figure out why there was such a huge difference between last year and this year. I mean, I observed it, and I broke it. But I never felt that I had failed it because, as I said last year, “Something doesn’t have to be 100% successful to be 100% successful.”

I learned a LOT. I learned a lot during that period that had lasting spiritual and emotional impact on me. So how could it have been a failure?

It wasn’t, and it hit me that it wasn’t, because I didn’t have a personal stake in it. While I enjoyed very, very much participating in it, it wasn’t obligatory for me. It was an exercise, an experiment.

Because I wasn’t Baha’i.

So I struggled with it and struggled with it and struggled with it. I’m still not Baha’i. So it’s still not obligatory for me.

Only the overwhelming feeling of failure and sadness made me realize that there is a part of me for which the Fast IS obligatory. Otherwise, it would have been just another experiment that I wasn’t able to complete.

And that is what stopped me. I had been working with a specific obligatory prayer since January since I was dealing with the notion of powerlessness, and I used it because I was drawn to it with the First Step. I didn’t use it because it was obligatory.

But something happened when the obligatory prayer met the obligatory Fast, I think. Because of my weekend sleep, Monday was the first day I recited it in direct conjunction with preparation for a foodless day.

And as much as I want to say “I’m moving towards the Baha’i Faith (thereby ensuring a lack of arrival)” or whatever, but the truth is that I’ve been drawn to the Faith for a while now, over a year.

It started off as curiosity. Then I realized how much it resonated with what I believed. And, strangely enough, it was the the Baha’i Faith that pushed me into attending a Unity church. And while I was getting my Unity groove on, and doing some pretty hard-core healing in the mean time (although, it’s only in retrospect that I recognize that), the Baha’i pull grew stronger and stronger.

In January, when I worked the Third Step and turned my life and my will over to God, I specifically asked God for his aid in making the things that were good for me more and more attractive and the things that weren’t less and less so. I did so with the intention of food, and He decided (which is His right, since He knows so much better than I do!) that it wasn’t limited to food.

It has touched so many different areas of my life, that I’ve barely been able to keep up. Actually, I haven’t been able to keep up.

But the Baha’i Faith is one of them. Whereas I had been “thinking about one day” looking into finding a local study group, I actually did start looking in January. (And it’s only now, that I’m writing, that I’m really starting to put all of this together). While that proved to be disappointing, I did discover some other resources. I started looking, at any rate, rather than merely procrastinating.

Other little things, too, now that I think about it. I had been asked by a friend if I were going to be doing that “Fasting thing” again, and I was surprised, because there was never any doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t be doing it. But looking back, it was a valid question.

I’ve been impulsive almost all of my life. I’ve jumped in without proper examination and ended up breaking commitments.

And that’s something important to me, this newly found power of commitment, even if it wasn’t manifesting in the Fast the past couple of days. I’ve managed it through school. I’ve managed it through a church class–through several church classes, actually. I always thought I’ve been bad at commitment, but I’m learning that it isn’t always true.

And I think it’s ironic, in the way that so much of my life is so ironic, that it took me breaking one commitment to realize that I’ve been trying to make another one all along.