What good is wisdom

When it brings no profit to the wise?

I wrote this about 4 months ago:

I need to get my shit together. I just do. It’s easy to get lax about certain things when you have given up. But when you gotta get up and fight again, ugh. That’s where I’m at. I gave up on a dream and now that I am back in the game with it, I need to get it together. I flat out do. I’ve been lax with my cardio. My weight training is going well again, but I have gotten slack with the cardio and slack with my healthy eating habits. I just gave up. No other way to say it. I got over my 2011 Black Cloud of Depression, which was good. But I gave up on my bashert and I gave up on God. I decided I needed to do my own thing. And that pretty much got me nowhere, LOL. Except miserable and confused and about 10 lbs heavier than I want to be right now. (Sorry for all this kvetching but I do call this Sara’s Place to Rant.) So now I have to rebuild my momentum from scratch. This is the tough part. As Trump says, if you stop moving forward, all of your previous momentum will swing you right in the ass. That’s happened to me. You remember in Rocky III how Rocky is goofing around and not taking the match seriously? Then he gets his ass handed to him. I’m there and that’s me. Now I have to go back to the “old ways” with Apollo and get serious about my life. The whole thing, not just one or two components of it.

Now I need to actually take my own f*cking advice. I wish I had done it then but better late than never, I suppose. I really did give up and that just sucks. Suuuuuucks. Then I laid down and stayed defeated. I embraced people who enjoyed my defeated attitude and wallowed in it. Remember the story of the Prodigal Son and how he found a job feeding pigs and the slop they ate looked good to him? Yep, that's been me. I thought 2012 was going to bring some miraculous relief from the pit of 2011. But I didn't see the bigger picture. We all have periods of time in life where we walk through the wilderness or find ourselves stuck in the pigpen. It's not so much about attempting (futilely) to control those outward circumstances; it's about your reaction to them. I didn't see that before. I was angry about leaving the old job, my mentor refusing proper cancer treatments and dying, and then getting suckered into 6 weeks of hell at a joke-ass company. A lot of ghosts followed me into 2012 though. For the past 15 years, I have consistently been saddled up with a goofball. First it was my high school sweetheart, then it was my BFF, then it was Darcy. The common threads are that I didn't truly like them, respect them, or have a sense of compatibility. This is the first time in all those years that I am truly walking the trail solo. I'm not going to BS about it either: it has been scary as hell sometimes over these past few weeks. To quote Bryan Duncan, "I spent my time between the answers And I swear there's nothin that leaves you more alone." Just because I don't really know what comes next is not an excuse to give up. I spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears with my weight training and then walked away from it. Thinking about it makes my blood boil. I can't believe I got so far and then set all the iron down and said, "F*ck it." I'd hit a plateau, which frustrated me, understandably, but instead of talking to a PT and getting recommendations on what to do next, I just walked away. There is a lot going on that I'm not happy about. I'm not happy at work, for one thing, and that apathy is bleeding into other areas of my life. I've tried to force myself to care and to be a rah-rah cheerleader but I'm not. The company I am with is not the place I intend to retire from. There's nothing wrong with anything per se; it's more an issue of a shoe that doesn't fit my foot. There's nothing about it that feels organic to me. I force myself to get up and go and life is too short to live that way. So that is something I intend to change when the right opportunity presents itself. For the time being in my personal life, the old ways must come back. And I'm not going to BS about that either. It too will suck. I was thinking about all the various and sundry injuries I had when I was lifting seriously and reminiscing on groin pulls, torn intercostals, a busted cheek, backaches, etc. That initial push at the beginning is a major bend-over. However, the beginning is also when you see your best gains. I would like to think that by this time in January, some fat will have gone away and the formation in my lats will be coming back. (Although I historically have had a "bad back," whenever I am lifting real iron, my lats are always the first thing to blow up. It's amazing to watch.) 

What's yet to come, I have no clue. But what I can control is myself. And myself is getting back in the weight room and kicking it Apollo style. I start my first session of upside down training tomorrow and it is gonna be an eye-opener. I remember basically what it was like from before and I expect an Aleve will be needed thereafter.