I am a daddy's girl. I was raised by my dad and have seen him in so many forms. I have seen him as a gladiator gym buff saving the world, I have seen him sick and frail, I have seen him bloated with stress, and lean. I have seen him in many shapes in between. I am thankful that today, he is well and in good form.
One thing I hear him say is that "he wants to get back to where he was…" I also hear so many other people use this seemingly harmless language of "getting back," whether it be getting back together, getting back in shape, etc.
I was at a wedding luncheon yesterday and a former marathon runner, now Phd and mother of 4 kids between 8 and 18 and 2 step children saying she was so out of shape and wanted to get back to how she was before. She looks vibrant and healthy to me. Though, I can understand her wanting to improve. We all do. Yet that specific language causes bells to go off. In my mind, when I hear "go back" two things happen. First a connection to the speaker. I understand the speaker may be referring to that elusive "back" like a place holder in time to where some ideal and perfect form existed whether in their mind, body, financially, professionally, or in any other aspect. Then next thing I do is hurt for them because I know in my own experience, when idealizing the past, it causes the memories to feel like reality and creates a yearning for what was. This is a dangerous slope to try to ascend. Getting back literally means you have to go back in time or backwards on a path to get there where you once were so that you can improve some aspect of self. I imagine it like trying to walk up a wet slide with flip flops on. Not pretty.
Let's explore this more. What if insead of trying to "get back," we just move forward. We can use our past experiences in wellness, success, fitness sand relationships to inform our future but we never need to get back to where we were. That time is no longer available to us. We will be searching endlessly to no avail. There will not be contentment just yearning which leads to suffering.
Then, how about we move forward. Move forward toward wellness. Creating rituals that will honor where we have been and where we are now and where we wish to go. A ritual is more effective than a routine because we make it sacred by the attention and intention with put it. It also changes based on season and let's face it, we have to tweak our routines to suit what actually is going on inside and out, rather than attack goals indiscriminately regardless of circumstance. That way we incrementally grow into who we want to be with compassion and no expectation that each day will be or feel the same. We account for the realities of what happens in life and shift our focus or duration based upon that. Yet, incrementally we can move toward massive goals and move up one notch at a time. And we never have to move backwards, in time or space. We move forward with the progression around us. Honoring the cycle of birth, life and death is important with any goal. And the past is dead and its ashes build our futures. It is not morbid, its real. We can move into our future by letting the past die. But just as those we love and lost stay with us in our hearts and minds, so can the lessons of the past. And the best part is, we don't punish ourselves to become a form of us we once were and we move with the grace of time, honoring the cycle.
I appreciate my father for all he has done. I support him in any shape he wishes to take. I only hope for his own love and for all of our own love of self, that and he we move forward and not back.
I am grateful for language and its ways to unlock our perceptions. We can use semantics to draw our feelings out, like the feeling of a need to move to a past existence, "a getting back to," notice and honor how this emotion arises and reframe our goals with present and future direction.
Now, let's move forward with this insight and never again back.
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