Being Unreasonable

The end of the year tends to have a ramp up of energy that culminates for most with a Le roi est mort, vive le roi, kind of celebration. Out with the old in with the new. But what do you do when the old bleeds into the new? Word on the street is that fewer people have made new year’s resolutions for 2022. I don’t blame them. How can you set goals in a world that doesn’t respect your sovereignty? (hat tip to Renu Murik for endearing me to this word again). There are far too many reasons to bolster this argument. Instead, let’s just not ask for permission and do what we know intrinsically to be true. I mean for the health-challenged-you kind of know what you need to do right? For those who haven’t been reading enough and want to read more, I have a feeling you too, know what to do. Those wishing a different lifestyle choice have but to make it. And here is the kicker: If you can do it when the odds are against you, then imagine what chances you have when the odds start aligning with you are playing at! 

When I lived in Alaska, I took on the challenge of juicing all my food for one month. That’s right. No solid foods for a whole month. I juiced all my vegetables and fruits in -45F weather (on average). I’d have to cover up my produce before exiting the store else the dry cold would freeze dry them before I got them under the cover of the warm car, which was kept running whilst shopping because the engine wouldn’t turn over if I shut it off in that cold. Thirty days of “Wow, I feel so good in this morning.” This was the mental game I would play. Mornings were the best. I would push through the afternoons and in the evenings, the dark and cold would seep in and I would just want some comfort food. I’d sit there with my dark green and earth colored juice, a recipe of kale, spinach, apple, lemon, and celery. Thirty days of convincing myself I could eat in the morning if I wanted to but giving up at night, when it was hardest, was not an option. If I gave up, I wanted to do when I felt good and energized, not when I was feeling defeated. I called that game the “Dread Pirate Roberts game”-for you Princess Bride fans out there. When Wesley explains to Buttercup how the dread pirate Roberts took him in and every night said “That’s all for tonight, I’ll most likely kill you in the morning” for years. The game of pushing off “the quit” was excruciatingly simple. That experience changed my life. I lost 29 pounds in 30 days and kept it off. My doctor’s couldn’t believe how healthy I had become in 1 month. I felt like a teenager again. My body felt good. It felt good to be in my skin. The whole time, I remember thinking, it’s not a hunger issue (because hunger stops around day 4); It’s a mind issue. It’s weird not eating and the whole world wants to sell you food on TV. Everything we sell ourselves during the day, we end up buying at night. 

So back to the post-pandemic world (as I like to optimistically call it now). Yes, there are obstacles. There are a lot of VERY reasonable reasons why you can convince me and others not to do what you need to do to create the lifestyle you want. Perhaps this post-pandemic world needs a little unreasonablenesses to push through the noise and clutter of the world telling you what you can and can’t do. Perhaps setting one 1 major goal can entice you to shift your lifestyle to one you will thank yourself for choosing 52 weeks into the future. If you start now, you can transform yourself and you know it. Maybe you just need to give yourself permission to get going and not wait for ideal conditions. I could not have picked a less ideal situation to do my juice fast. It was well below freezing daily, only a few hours of sunlight during the day. Home alone with a husband deployed to a war zone, living in a new state, knowing no one, where everything costs 4-5 times what “the lower 48” pay on a daily rate, driving on ice to get to the store, leave the car running with the keys inside and never having done this sort of thing. I became my own champion. I looked at everyone eating heavy foods at the warm diners and realized that I was being unreasonable-and I loved it. There was a Bruce Lee thing happening and I couldn’t quite figure it out, but it was fantastic.

What price are you willing to pay to have the lifestyle you want? Better yet, what is it going to cost you at the end of the year if you haven’t started? Are you willing to pay the price to be unreasonable and do for yourself what no one else will do: provide the self-care, compassion and attention you would do for others in a heartbeat? Self-care is a luxury you can afford because you know exactly what needs to be done to get there. It doesn’t require vast quantities of money or gear. It requires a desire to be a better version of yourself than you were yesterday, a plan of what small and permanent habit changes you can make for this week and the time blocked off to do those things. 

I wish you all the fortitude to dive into a lifestyle that aligns yourself with how you see yourself for 2022. Define success for yourself. Be your own champion. No one else is coming to save you from this world. Set the pace for unreasonable living by doing the opposite of what most are doing. You won’t get it right. You will stumble. You will forget to write it down. You will ignore what you’ve written down and you will have gotten 3 out of 7 on the first week and 5 out of 7 on the second and by the third week you will have championed the first step of getting where you want to get to and be well on your way. If you don’t push through those steps, you will still be waiting, as a spectator, on the sidelines waiting for the perfect course of events to show up for you. Those alignments happen very rarely. You’ve got to create the circumstances for your unreasonableness. The world is ready to knock you down and say “Hey, who do you think you are? Be reasonable.” And you will smile, knowing your unreasonable nature has now started you on a path no one needs to give you permission for. Happy New Year, lovelies