write and share a "This I Believe" essay

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90368555

Very informative!

one year later…

and it actually has to do with our (former) dry cleaner!

I have really backburnered this goal, but I suddenly realized that I usually write in response to something I’ve read, so I bought a collection of James Thurber’s writing, and a collection of E.B. White. White’s been one of my heroes forever, but his essay “Here is New York” knocks me flat in an entirely new way. What he had to say about NYC in 1948 is true, true, true nearly 60 years later. What a mind he had.

as I’m trying to focus on my most important goals & priorities

because i just don’t feel like doing this right now.

but just because i’m moving it to my ‘give up’ pile doesn’t mean it’s permanently given up on, kay?

:)

I got the standard nice notification that my essay wasn’t chosen for reading on the air. That’s what I expected. It was still a good exercise to write it!

I believe that anyone can lose weight with the proper motivation. Growing up I always had a healthy appetite and there were always plenty of seconds and sometimes thirds to go around. My grandfather had a large stomach, and most of my relatives were overweight. Being fat was the norm in my family, and I didn’t think anything of it. Yes, I didn’t like my man boobs at times and didn’t like to take my shirt off during the summer, but I was not motivated to do anything about it. When I graduated high school I weighed 180 lbs and stood five feet eleven. That was at the high-end of the normal range, and I didn’t think I looked too fat.

Over the next four years when I was in college, I put on the “freshman fifteen” and wound up capping out around 220 lbs which I stayed at for the next couple of years. I eventually moved into my own apartment where I cooked for myself. Cooking for one was never something I learned. I learned how to make a tray of lasagna or a pot of spaghetti. I didn’t learn about portion control. In college, you could go back and get as many helpings as you wanted (and I had). If I cooked half a box of spaghetti, I’d eat that whole amount throughout the night instead of leaving some as leftovers. I wound up putting on another 90 plus pounds over the last fifteen years to max out at 314.

Several years ago my grandfather was in the hospital and as I was looking at his chart I saw that he weighed 219. He was a good half-foot shorter than me, and I remember thinking at the time that I weighed 20 pounds more than him and I had always considered him to be fat. It made me think about my own perception of myself, but it didn’t motivate me to lose the weight. Neither did seeing my family doctor write morbidly obese in my medical chart. A few years ago I had to pay extra for a helicopter ride in Alaska because I weighed more than 250 lbs. None of that motivated me to lose the weight.

For my 38th birthday, my parents and I went to see the Body Works exhibit in Cleveland. One of the displays that they had was a thin person and a fat person sliced open so you could compare the differences. I thought it was interesting but it didn’t impact me or make me want to lose the weight. For my overweight mother, it was life altering. She hired a personal trainer and began to work out. She altered her diet, reducing her caloric intake and eating smaller meals throughout the day. She began to reshape her body and her life. Over the next nine months, she lost sixty pounds and dropped from a size 22 to a size 4.

Seeing mom do it was the motivation I needed. Right after Thanksgiving last year I cut out all starches and processed sugars from my diet. I had been eating pasta three or four times a week, and now I have it maybe once a month. In the first month, I dropped 30 pounds without increasing my exercise. Now I’ve increased my exercise and am going to the gym six days a week. I have lost 84 pounds in six months and weigh in at 230. I’ve dropped from a 44 waist down to a 36, and intend to get back down to my 34s which I wore when I graduated high school. If I can lose weight, anybody can lose weight. You just have to find the right motivation. This I believe.

I believe in the body.

Ultimately I don’t believe much in ideas and principles, even though I use these unseen constructs constantly in my work and in my personal struggle to make sense of the world. Ideas and principles are just tools we humans use to sort out our world and our life within it. The real energy, our life itself, is communion with each other, with the rest of creation, and with the One who made us all. Our physical being is born of communion, and in Genesis, the book of beginnings, the embodied life-in-communion of human beings and other creatures is deemed very good.

Over the centuries, though, our bodies have been much maligned and mistreated. The Greek philosophers, bless their systematic souls, tended to hypothesize the body as a casing, a container imprisoning the spirit—something to be escaped and transcended. My own Christian tradition picked up valuable insights from the philosophers but sometimes tried too hard to harmonize them with biblical teachings about creation.

If the body doesn’t matter, you see, it can be starved, hated, beaten, indulged, made into an object. Eventual results in my tradition have included a devaluation of sexuality and marriage, a fear of visual art and dance, and, all too often, a justification of violence.

But since childhood I have loved words with a kind of helpless wonder, and poetry has taught me to love the body—my own and others’. Poetry takes me into the physical world and nudges me to see it, taste it, smell it, because the poem comes alive when it is an act of communion, bearing textures and odors and colors to the hearer or reader.

Skin, for example: Poetry makes me look carefully at light falling on the skin of my child, my sister, a stranger on the bus. It makes me notice shadows, the shape of a particular nose, a summer evening’s light sheen of perspiration down a leg.

The body matters. This, of course, has been part of Christian belief since the beginning. God loves this messy world (and our physical life within it) so much that the Word of God’s own self-uttering became flesh and made a home with human beings. It was a breathtakingly poetic thing to do.

Jesus Christ has said a radical yes to the body, and thus as a poet and a Christ-follower I honor the body with my noticing, my love, and my small words.

but it’s in no shape to share.

I am tabling this goal for a while…