Here’s a question, then. I do “pray” for help against gluttony on my morning and evening walks, but I don’t really feel I’m engaging in it in any serious way. Does that mean it’s idle? Or that it needs souping up somehow? I mean, I am keeping to regimen, barring a few cough drops here and there, and it’s working, so do I even need to?
Well, yes, I actually do, because I’m not really addressing the disconnective part of it well, and if I don’t do that, then – as I know well from experience – the pressure will slowly build until I bust loose. That’s how it’s always happened, and that’s why, despite all my successes, I find myself, six or seven years down the road, twenty-some pounds overweight and still engaged in this weary internecine war. What I want is not to weigh 167.3 pounds: what I want is peace.
So in that regard – no, I really am not doing very well. Given the stresses of the lead-up to Martha’s second knee surgery, I can maybe count just keeping in regimen as a win: but it’s important not to slip into a purely materialist mindset and mistake the finger for the moon. What I really want is peace, fullness, connection. And that means Doing Something Different.
Realize that this is intimately related to these boxes on our daily checklists that we can never check off. The endless, tedious search for titillation is also what occupies so much time that theres “no time” to do the liturgy work or the 2 pp of Trafalgar. There’s lots of time. I am never ever going to “have more time” than I have now.
I think perhaps what I need is not more resolve – and anyway, where does one purchase more resolve? At WinCo? – but more brainstorming, and possibly more help from actual other living beings. Rather than praying distantly to a probably nonexistent God, come up with alternate activities. The music is one. Reading a Big Book is two. I’ve actually made good use of both of these. Another one might be watching some netflix series with Martha. Yet another making something with my hands. I mean, I might just go to hobby shops, hardware stores, TAP plastics, and see what synapses fire.