It
is a much mourned fact of life that watching exercise videos does not
build muscles. Couch potatoes who can legitimately boast about six-pack
abs do not exist.
Reading
bodybuilding books does not get the job done, either. Reading can take
us on many wondrous journeys of the mind, but it would not pump up the
Pecs.
It
takes sweat and effort to build muscles. Copious amounts of sweat and
muscles trembling with intensity, day after day. There is no easy way.
And
so it is with emotional muscles. They, too, require regular exercise
and, often, emotional sweat-a knot in the stomach, dread at hearing the
phone ring.
We
do not have to join a gym and show up for workouts, though. Life is the
gym, and it comes to us. Or should I say, comes at us?
Every
day, opportunities arrive to help us build a little muscle. They look a
lot less like opportunities than like problems. But there they are,
daring us-even taunting us-and we need to do something about them. We
will need to make choices about our response.
The
first choice is how to handle the problem. We can choose to face
problems head on, or we can whine and try to offload them on somebody
else. The latter option looks tempting whenever we know a patsy too
insecure to refuse, but this tactic will come back to bite us. By the
time it does, though, offloading will be integrated into how we do life,
and habits are not a spigot we can turn off with the flick of a wrist.
We'll destroy many good things by the time we figure out how to change
our approach.
The
best bet is to face any problem head on so you finish it off and not
have to go around that mountain again. Call it God, call it fate, call
it whatever you want to, but life has a way of making sure we learn
necessary lessons.
Another
choice we get is avoidance. We might make this choice early on or after
we realize how bumpy the road will be. Will we sweat it out and work
our way through? Or will we take a pill, take a drink, blame somebody
else or use any number of other escapes to avoid the challenge placed
before us?
At
first glance, choosing avoidance looks pretty clever. "Let some other
poor dopes struggle, not me." And we rattle off a virtual full-length
novel of rationalizations about why standing aside makes sense.
Well,
look again. Those other poor dopes are building muscles, and they will
be ready to run tomorrow's race. Avoiders, at some point, will get left
at the starting gate, watching the others pull away toward success. It
would not be fun.
Another
choice is whether or not to look beyond the bare bones of the problem
to seek out the opportunity, there is always at least one that is in
there somewhere. If we only see the problem, it is all sturm, all drang
and no "aha." A body needs "aha" moments from time to time.
Then,
once we locate the opportunity, we choose whether to take advantage of
the opportunity or ignore it. Just because we can see the silver around
the cloud and the gold at the end of the rainbow does not mean there is
not some heavy lifting involved. Sometimes we just want to say, "I gave
at the office" and are done with it. But without striving, life is just
so much oatmeal, so we might as well go for it.
But a lot of us balk. We are weary of dealing with problems, opportunities, whatever you want to call them. We want life to proceed with ease. Sunshine every day, kids that do not talk back, a boss who regularly decides we are underpaid, our biggest concern whether or not to crook our pinky when we pick up a tea cup. Wake up, get with the reality and start lifting.
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