A Step Back?

On the evening of July 16th, 1999, a luxury aircraft piloted by John F. Kennedy, Jr. crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after take-off. Tragically, the accident killed John, Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Kennedy, Jr. was at fault because he hadn't logged all of the hours required to receive his pilot's license. In this incident, the pilot lacked the training needed for flying at night, but nonetheless ventured out on the night of the 16th. According to the NTSB, Kennedy crashed due to a phenomenon known as spacial disorientation. When flying at night over open water, pilots can become disoriented. Their instincts tell them that they are flying upside down and steer to correct even though their instruments indicate they are flying level and right side up. They believe that their instruments have failed, when in fact their eyes have failed, and they fly the plane straight into the water below.

When this tragedy occurred, I found the whole thing to be very peculiar. How could one's senses deceive them so much and in that event, why wouldn't you trust your instruments? Instruments were developed because we as humans are flawed. Instruments are the means of impartially telling us how we're doing, where we are, or where we are going. As I've endeavored on this life improvement journey, the scale in my bathroom is my best barometer of my performance in my life and a fantastic indicator of my future.

I purchased an iPhone six or seven months ago and I'm satisfied beyond words. The first app I put on my phone was the calorie tracker from livestrong.com. The app and website are both incredible! With livestrong in my pocket, I put the pencil and paper away and started tracking my calorie consumption digitally. I wanted to slow my weight loss so my skin didn't look like a ball of pizza dough, so I set my calorie level so that I would lose about a pound and a half a week. The most incredible thing was that I could use the app to track my activity as well. So, as I would burn calories through exercise, my phone was telling me I could eat more to stay at losing a pound and a half a week.

Before I knew it, I was using this new tool to get back to my old tricks. I'm embarrassed to say it was all about the food again. I gained back about 22 pounds in the last 8 months and it's clear that my behavior has changed. "If I ride the bike for an hour, then we can go to Olive Garden for supper... I'm absolutely exhausted and I'm going to hurt myself if I keep pushing, but ten more minutes and we can go for ice cream after supper," but why? Why do I feel the need to abuse myself?

The whole time that I was so sick I was functioning at 25 percent speed and I had fallen behind in so many aspects of my life. Now I'm struggling to catch back up. On top of this struggle, we've been working on remodeling the house, which isn't a small task. If that wasn't enough to impair my progress, for some reason I feel such a sense of obligation towards putting a smile on my little princess' face. She's been going through a really rough time these past few months and I just have this overwhelming urge to buy her a pony every time I see her beautiful eyes glaze over with concern and sorrow. Their pain is my pain. Their worries and fears are my worries and fears. All this and I can't even think of when I took a day for myself.

See, for some reason, I prefer to get caught up in other people's problems instead of dealing with my own. Instead of focusing on myself, I've been going bananas with worry about finishing the house because my queen is worrying about the house. It is easier to concentrate of making my princess smile than making myself smile. I've been so caught up in the feeling of responsibility for everyone around me that I had convinced myself that eating 4,300 calories a day was a good idea!

The good news in all of this is that even though I've gained 20 pounds, I've increased only one pant size because I was working out so much that those extra calories went to muscle, and believe me it went to muscle. My arms, legs, and abs are in incredible shape, but my flexibility has gone south. I stopped going to yoga because it was too slow and relaxing and "I just didn't have time for that shit!"

So, with shame in my heart, it's back to the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid)! It's back to a fixed number calories and the end of this flexible spending nonsense. I need to make it less about the food and more about myself! It's back to a variety of exercises with no consideration for Olive Garden, Dairy Queen, or any other place I have no business frequenting. It also seems that I'm not as emotionally advanced as I thought, so I think it's a good idea to get back into therapy. Finally, I need to have a little faith in myself and my loved ones that the world won't fall apart if I let them down off my shoulders, because holding them up there just isn't fair to anybody.

I thought that spacial disorientation was such a ridiculous concept, but it turns out that your instruments are only as good as what you want them to indicate. I was slowly working my way back to the ocean and I was actually proud, if not arrogant, of what I was doing. When I was in North Carolina, I would become flabbergasted after talking to some fellow "life improvers" because they had lost 60, then gained 40, then lost 120, but then gained 150, but this was the time they were going to be successful... How is this possible? It turns out that this sort of oscillation is just a part of the human condition that we all must endure, myself included. "It's not how many times you fall down, but how many times you get back up." This is what happens when you focus on the goal line instead of the next defender or when you start running to first base before you even hit the ball. Recovering addicts will say that "today is the first day of the rest of my life." Well, I happily embrace today so that tomorrow might be a brighter day.

I don't know what to say really. Three minutes till the biggest battle of
our professional lives. It all comes down to today. Now either we heal as a
team, or we're gonna crumble. Inch by inch, play by play, till we're finished.
We're in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And we can stay here, get the
shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb
out of hell. One inch at a time.

Now I can't do it for you. I'm too old. I look around, I see these young
faces, and I think... I mean I've made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can
make. I pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who's
ever loved me, and lately, I can't even stand the face I see in the mirror. You
know when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That's part of life.
But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life's this
game of inches. And so is football. Because in either game, life or football,
the margin for error is so small. I mean... one half a step too late or too
early and you don't quite make it. One half second too slow too fast, you don't
quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every
break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that
inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for
that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we
add up all those inches, that's gonna make the fucking difference between
winning and losing! Between living and dying! I'll tell you this - in any fight,
its the guy whose willing to die who's gonna win that inch. And I know if I'm
going to have any life anymore, it's because I'm still willing to fight and die
for that inch. Because that's what living is! The 6 inches in front of your
face...