Fat headed

First of all, sorry I keep writing.  But I did scan some of my great grandmother’s letters.  And I wrote a chapter of the book, and I took a shower.  And ate.  Breakfast.  Honest.  And I’m pretty well done here now.  What a relief.  All that thinking out of my head.  So I won’t be knocking on your inbox for a while.  Maybe.

G sent me this link.  It’s one of those pundit blogs, and it concerns home education, and I found it—provoking.  So you might have fun looking at it.  I want you to keep in mind that I was a little miffed when I wrote my comment on the thing.  And my position may not be something you agree with at all.  That’s the wonderful part—my friendships are not based on political opinion, but on people.  You are allowed to disagree with me all you want (ad hominem attacks the exception) and I will love and admire you just as much.  HURRAH AMERICA!!!

So: What I learned on TV. This morning. On the treadmill.

I was watching The Biggest Loser (Do TV shows really rate italics, I wonder?), which is great motivation.  These poor gigantic people (this season, the biggest people EVER) are working their tails off, and me?  Running hard without feeling a thing (read: walking uphill really, really fast).

What do I love best about the show?  When they say, “This forty eight year old grandmother . . .,” talking about a woman who looks twenty years older than I do and is actually ten years younger.  Yeah.  I’m shallow. But very, very happy when that happens.

This morning’s talking points:

1)  New-age-ish Trainer Bob was talking to the largest man ever on the show—a nice guy who weighed in at about 546 pounds.  When they got on the scale after the first grueling week of workouts, the guy had lost a whopping 54 pounds (I think.  That’s what I remember.)  Of course, that huge loss was the result of all those cells dumping their reserve H2O (along with a week’s huge and totally unaccustomed calorie deficit).

“How did you get this way?” Bob asked the guy, looking at all that weight with wonder.

The guy teared up.  “All my life it was two steps forward, then three steps back.  I can’t believe I let this happen.  I had no idea I was over five hundred pounds.”

“But you’ve lost over fifty now.  Being here. Doing this,” Bob said, referring to the week  of literal sweat and tears and pain.  I saw the footage – a huge, screaming man, soaked with sweat— trying to lift weights, trying to run on a treadmill—suffering, being pushed by relentless trainers.

“This is a gift,” Bob said.

And that is what caught me.

A gift.

Don’t you think of a gift as something you get for free? A Wii, maybe.  Or a cruise.  Or a box of dark chocolate.

The only free thing about being selected to go that the Biggest Loser Ranch was the opportunity.  The opportunity to actually work your butt off.  When you open that gift, there’s nothing but strict education and bald, scalding work inside.

And I started thinking—that’s what real gifts are, the chance to do something, the opportunity to make something happen.  Real gifts carry a price tag; they aren’t about passive pleasure.

I think that’s what a blessing is.  You take the opportunity, and you work your back end off to turn that into something real. Freedom, love, family, education, a lovely life—you have to do the work to get them, and you have to do the work to keep them.

Anyway, it was interesting to me, that sudden deepening of the concept: gift.

2)  To make a point, they’d brought the man to the courtyard and had him face Bob—who they then loaded up with vests and straps full of the weight difference between the two men: over three hundred pounds of extra weight.  Bob could hardly stand up under the weight.  For all his strength, Bob staggered, and said that his legs hurt.  And his shoulders.

“How do you do it?” he asked in amazement.  “How do you carry all of this?”

Later, the doctor showed the man scans of his inner-self.  “This,” the doctor said, outlining the broad, light colored balloon around the skeleton and muscle, “is your fat.  This—“ he outlined a tiny triangle, high in the chest cavity, “is your lung.”

The man was amazed. “How does it supply oxygen for all of that?” he wondered.

It really was amazing.

And I thought two things:

Here is a man carrying a burden he has taken on voluntarily.  He walks upright.  He isn’t quick or supple, but he has to have developed tremendous strength, just to hold himself up.  All that strength, to deal with a totally unnecessary burden.  I wondered, if all that hydrated fat suddenly disappeared, would he be one of the strongest men in the world?  That strength, but in a normal, unburdened, totally oxygenized body?  He has had to develop this strength, but he is totally unaware of it.  It’s barely equal to his trial.   He has cloaked it with helplessness.

And I thought about those lungs of his—so valiantly doing the work of three sets of lungs.  How sturdy a body this man must have, to have stayed alive this long – his organs, some of the best: still working, even under these conditions.  What quality of life might he have had if he had not made things so hard for his body?  The best equipment, wasted.

So I thought about those things, and about what they might mean as metaphors.  There are no MRIs that can show me what burdens I put on my soul, or even on my brain, burdens that misuse the tools I’ve been given, waste my time, my strength.  I can feel them—my pride, my tendency to moral outrage, my problem with arbitrary authority, my lack of focus.  Nothing wrong with hating injustice, unless you let your anger remove you from the things in life that you can control.  Unless your anger renders you useless – or worse, counter productive.

Anyway.  There you go.  The Biggest Loser, a treadmill, and the moral of the story.