I Don't Want What I Want?

I read a lot.  A lot, a lot.  All the time.  I love to read and I love reading new things - blogs, articles, books, journals, even menus.  (Love a good menu!)  The downside to reading so much is that sometimes I read something that sticks with me, but then I can't remember where I read it.  So when I want to quote it, I am ashamed to have to admit that I have no earthly clue who wrote it.  I am about to do so, so apologies to whomever I am about to rip off.   I promise that if it comes to me, I will credit you!

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I was reading........... something......... the other day.  A book, I'm pretty sure, and the author (who I am 99% convinced was a woman) made the point that while it's easy for you to say "I want X," if everything you're doing is not in pursuit of X, then what you really want is something else.  

It's a very basic, very simple truth - and yet it's so profoundly huge that it makes me want to cringe.

I often think that I want to be better.  Stronger.  Faster.  More agile.  More physically capable.  Yet, apparently what I really want, is to be lazy and overweight.  Because, really, that's what my actions are screaming to the world.  My crazy muffin obsession over the past two months.  My protestations that it's too cold to run outside, and that I don't like going to the gym.  My inability to stick with a workout DVD for more than two days. My total denial regarding my increasing weight gain. (My muffin top to go with my muffin obsession.)

"I want to be healthy and strong and fierce."    Do you?  Do you, really?  Or do you want to melt into the background and stuff your face with sugar and do none of the hard work that it would actually require to get you where you "want" to be?

Erica from Wornout Soles wrote today that "Hope is not a strategy."   (Ok, sometimes I remember where I read things!)   This thought goes along with the saying on my favorite Nike t-shirt.  "Dreams don't work unless you do."

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I can't sit on the couch stuffing my face and magically be thin and strong.  I know that.  I am not an idiot.  Yet apparently, I don't care.  Somehow, what I want right now is to eat crappy food and be lazy and feel bad about myself.    What the hell is that about??

In 2005, shortly after I got married, I quit smoking.  12 year habit that I'd had since high school, done.  I just stopped.  I told myself I wasn't going to smoke any more, and that was it.  (Full disclosure, I did have half a cigarette a few months later, on New Years Eve  but I was drunk and it tasted like crap which reinforced my whole "I will never smoke again" policy, and I have not even touched a cigarette since then.)  I mention this to point out that I can do hard things.  I can make smart decisions about my body and my health, and I can stick to them.  So what the heck?  Why is getting physically stronger not something that I can make the decision to do?  Are muffins really that good?  (Ok, trick question, because, duh.  Muffins!)  

Right now, my "I want" statement is geared towards food and laziness.  I need to find a way to kick it into healthfulness and gee, I don't know, running? Never mind the races that I've paid for and that I have coming up in a few months - this is more about my life, as whole, the kind of  example I want to set for my kids, and the kind of person I want to be.  Or, should I say, I think I want to be.  Want, it seems is trickier than it, well, seems.

Darn you, author whose name I can't recall.  (See what trouble reading can get you into?)

What do you want? Are you working towards it?