“Thanks for taking these library books back for me.” I said to my friend.
“You’re welcome, I’ll try to take care of that for you.”
“Try?” I asked myself. Try?
“Do you think you won’t be able to?” I asked her.
“Oh, no, I’ll stop over this afternoon and drop them off.” She replied.
“Okay, thanks so much.”
 
There’s a big difference between try and will. When my friend said she’d try, she didn’t sound committed to making sure the books would be returned. If at first she’d said, “Yes, I will take them over this afternoon” there would have been no question. It’s a firm commitment of intention.

“I really want to lose some weight” a client said to me.
“How much would you like to lose?”
“Probably 35 pounds, I’d like to weigh 125.”
“When was the last time you weighed 125?” I queried.
“When I was in college.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Fifty-five.”

Does this conversation resonate with you? You’ve put on some weight and you’d love more than anything to lose it and have the body you once had.

May I ever so gently remind you that you'll never be twenty again?

I don’t mean to sound defeatist. Not at all. I’m a realist and by that I mean, I accept the present moment with compassion. I allow that who and what I am in this moment is exactly the way I’m intended to be – a little rounder in the middle, gray hair, sagging breasts.

Sure, I’d like some things to be different. I too wouldn’t mind wearing some of the cute little outfits of my youth, but then again…

There are many ways we can move our bodies, but for me, I like walking. Inhaling fresh air, especially on a crisp fall day, is heaven on earth.

In the summer when it’s hot, I like to get up before the sunrise to walk. More than the heat though, the road I walk on is due east/west so the sun rises behind me and I’m not visible to oncoming traffic. The road is a very narrow country road, so there’s a survival component to my getting up early.

As I walk, I greet the maple trees in my front yard and the neighborhood Golden Retriever Ginger who sits outside waiting for a passerby to play ball with her. One morning, she sat with a plastic bat in her mouth – the image of it still cracks me up.

“No, we’re not eating lunch.” My friend Janet said. “We’re having hot fudge sundaes for dinner, remember?”

“What does that have to do with lunch?” I asked.

My stomach was hungry and I was getting a little shaky. We’d been water skiing all morning and I was ready to eat.

“A hot fudge sundae has a lot of calories,” Janet reminded me, “so if we don’t eat lunch we’ll stay within our calorie limit for the day.”

“Oh” was all I managed to say.

I didn’t get it. But Janet was the smart one in our teenage duo. We had become friends in ninth grade when I was put into an accelerated algebra class without ever knowing algebra and as Winnie the Pooh says, “that’s a long story and even longer when I tell it,” so I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say, because Janet was thin and I was not, I looked up to her and her theory on how to be thin.

I woke up the other night thinking about the body and how amazing it is. I mean, it’s so incredibly amazing that we don’t even know all the details of how it works. I love how we’re constantly learning new things about it.

And yet, we try to control and manipulate it.

I love it when I start thinking about the magnificence of the body. How, from one egg and one sperm, a body knows how to grow into form with an innate intelligence and the ability survive on planet earth.