I've been asking myself lately if I am willing to do whatever it takes to achieve my goals. It seems like the answer is usually "no", and I hate that. Especially because "whatever it takes" is usually something as small as not eating so much bread and peanut butter.
Ever since college, I've aspired to create and live within a perfect routine, to be like a robot running on a programmed loop of habits. Wake up, get dressed, workout, eat breakfast, shower, get dressed again, fix hair, skin care, go to work, eat lunch, work more, clean the house, write, practice piano, practice German, practice for choir, do chores, spend time with my husband, read, journal, go to bed on time, over and over and over.
The problems come during all the little moments when I deviate from my perfect program. I'm not a robot. I want to stay in bed and cuddle. I want to put extra peanut butter in my oatmeal. I want to bake cookies even though I didn't allocate time or calories for cookies. I want to spend an hour on the phone with my sister or my friend or my mom. I want to watch Netflix. I want to fill in a coloring book page. I want to deviate from the path. I want to rebel against my own plans. I want my dreams and my immediate desires to have nothing to do with each, to create no conflict, to require no sacrifice.
I can say "no" to things for a week, maybe a month. Eventually I no longer feel alive and I have to throw off the chains I wrote rules about and throw handfuls of figurative confetti into the air, snap my fingers, watch them burn, and dance with abandon on the ashes. As much as I want to build, to create, to grow, I want to destroy, to neglect, to deteriorate, to take risks, to flaunt my mortality, to whither daintily, suffer dramatically, and die beautifully. I am rubbernecking in the slow lane, watching my own crash unfold. At the same time, I'm changing my own tire and driving my own tow truck and bootstrapping myself into a better life. No wonder fall asleep sometimes telling God and the darkness, "I wonder who I am." I can't quite tell. I sure look like the picture of domesticity. I sure clean up nice. I sure want to buy another motorcycle and ride it too fast in the rain. I sure love drinking too much coffee. I sure love being a know-it-all about the ways unhealthy food is going to kill you, even though I don't follow my own advice 30% of the time.
You know that story about the two wolves, the dark and the light? Mine are both quite well fed and always ripping each other's throats out. And there aren't just two, it seems. It's a whole pack, and they're howling confusing directions and competing priorities until I'm deaf with their noise.
In high school, we used to say to each other with righteous smiles, "Consistency is the hallmark of ethics." I thought it was true. It's not exactly true, although I won't talk about why right now, but it's also even more important than I realized back then, so it's good that we said it and tried hard. Sometimes you learn a lesson, and then twenty years later you find out why you learned it and then you think, "Ah, now I know."
Sometimes I wish my day to day ethics weren't quite so wrapped up in the miles I run and the grams of peanut butter I eat. It's hard to measure, unfortunately, how polite I am on Zoom calls when I'm tired and whether I'm too harsh a critic of my family members and if I really listened attentively to the story my husband told me or just nodded along. When days end and I ask "Was I good today?" I think too quickly of things I can put into spreadsheets and not often enough of things I can put on a tombstone.
I mean, I guess you could put
"Loving Wife and Daughter
30g oats, 10g chia seeds, 18g peanut butter
Ran 2 miles on mornings it didn't rain hard"
on my tombstone. I won't be coming back to complain.
In the meantime, can I be a bit more of a good little robot who doesn't pick a new workout and diet plan every two weeks, and also, at the same time, a bit more of a good little human who keeps love and truth first, where they belong?
There are two wolves inside all of us, and one of them really likes tracking things in spreadsheets. The other one likes cookies, cuddles, and motorcycles.
