Bad Habits

 

Jim peered at the number on the scale. Jim thought he wasn’t the kind of person who defined his life by a number on the scale, at least not after he had defeated the number on the scale. But here he was. One would think that after spending years of forming a habit, one would stick to it always, but habits were so easy to break, one look away, one bad episode and all the days you struggled to stick to your habit comes crashing down. A taste of the bad and it is all over. Okay, maybe not all over, because when you start to fray on the edges and start crossing boundaries, you start realizing it, you start recognizing that you are breaking yourself, so you try to stop, but then sometimes you are unable to. It wasn’t fair, he had maintained his good habits for years, and within a week, he was starting to abandon all the things he thought he would never abandon because it him feel good. It made him feel good when he stuck to what made him better, but now he could feel it come crashing down. He had increased two kilograms. Now two kilograms weren’t that much but within one week it was. Maybe he shouldn’t have binged on all that ice-cream and crisps.  But he had been craving for them. He was sad and when he came home to an empty house it felt even more sad. Mostly he used to come home to Jenny. Jenny’s work used to finish earlier than his work and the noise known by the name of ‘Jenny’ used to always be there and now that his eyes didn’t greet her every day, he was upset and sure he had moved in with his best friend and had him to keep him company, but Tyler wasn’t Jenny, and he wanted ice-cream. And some spicy potato chips, and maybe a bit of ramen too.

And one week later, his good habit of checking the scale propelled him to weigh himself and now he was grossly unsatisfied and maybe a bit disappointed at himself that this tiny trigger was all it took to send him on a spiral which had landed him in a miserable place at the first time. Baked crisps were a scam. So was no-sugar ice-cream. And life’s troubles don’t in general reduce by consuming them, but sometimes, you seek out those little crumbs of happiness and you tell yourself that ‘It is okay, I deserve these small joys’, but apparently even the small joys cost a lot. It was ironic, small joys should be small and easy, they weren’t big but still they were so expensive. Everyone used to say – enjoy the little things – well, he was enjoying it, but his small joys were bringing him small pains too. People lie all the time. All the self-help books lied. Only when you live it, can you understand it. And his big joys brought him greater pain, but that was a different matter altogether. The point was he didn’t want to go back to where he was years ago and it sucked, it sucked that the scale goes higher faster than it goes lower.

It was ironic that even though he had a support system which consisted of his mates, his dance, he still went back to the one thing he wasn’t supposed to and that was food, binging till an uncomfortable weight made itself know, a sense of bloating which hurt his abdomen. Only pain substitutes pain, he guessed. He was fairly active and for the past week, he hadn’t wanted to do much, he didn’t go for his runs, skipped stretching before choreography, and just lazed around. He was glad in a way that he was the director, or else it would have been difficult. He could take time off, but he had a feeling that it would just make him more lethargic.

“Oh, come on.” A voice which sounded very much like his best-friend broke him out of his self-depreciating thoughts. “Stop staring at that darn thing like the world is ending.”

Jim huffed as he stepped off the scale. “You don’t know how it feels.”

“Let yourself off, you are going through a bad phase. You’ll be alright.”

“If I let myself go during every ‘bad phase’, I’ll end up getting diabetes.”

Tyler made a face at that.

“It is the good habits which help you get through bad times,” Jim said as he sat opposite to Tyler. “But unfortunately sticking to good habits in bad times is even more of a challenge,” Jim sighed.

“I really don’t think too much about life. It gets stressful that way, I am more of a go with the flow kind of a person. Bad things happen and trust me, they’ll pass. Stop crucifying yourself for it. I think you should be self-compassionate.”

“If I am too self-compassionate, I’ll end up—”

“Yeah yeah,” Tyler cut him off, “You’ll end up getting diabetes or cholesterol. But that is a long shot.”

Jim groaned. “You really don’t get it do you? I wanted to build good habits and lose weight because I didn’t like the place I was before, I wanted to get out of it, it was painful.  And now I can feel it slipping and I don’t want to end up in the same place I started, just because I couldn’t deal with challenges or unhappiness which life throws at me. It means I didn’t get strong at all.”

“Okay, so first of all, you are human and humans are influenced by emotions. You are not a rock, so it okay to be swayed by emotions. If you never felt joy, happiness, pain, empathy, then you would be a shitty excuse of a human. So, it is okay, we are like this, easily influenced by emotions and we all want to control our emotions, but we fail to realise that it is the emotions which make us human and hence I feel we should experience it, fully and freely, because they are transient and will leave us soon, no feeling is permanent.”

Jim paused and pondered over his words, they seemed to make sense, and in general Tyler lived a happy life, he was happy, took his happiness and sadness in a stride, strove to make the best out of everything. Yes, he was sad because of a break-up and he felt bad that he felt that way, but wasn’t that a part of human experience? It was okay to feel things, wasn’t it? No one really could stay in control of their lives 24 by 7, he wasn’t a monk, he was a normal person, with day-to-day problems, the stress of life weighing down on him, but isn’t that what drug addicts told themselves too? Escapism in all forms were bad, there wasn’t something like – Oh this form of escapism is bit better than drugs, so it is okay - ultimately, it was an escape. Wasn’t that the problem? Everyone was looking to escape life. We all want to live life’s happiness, but we all want to escape life’s unhappiness. So, unwilling to experience even a bit of suffering. Human existence was made up of suffering, with bits of happiness in between and we are so unwilling to accept that suffering was a part of life. Something we have to live through, whether we like it or not and it is only once when we accept it, and try to live through it does it start making sense. It is often the pain of suffering which pushes people to achieve great heights. Necessity is the mother of invention. Often a lot of self-improvement and perspective stems from pain, it pushes you to do better. When you are happy, you don’t really worry about improving yourself, do you? Our pain makes us who we are. It decides who we become. We decide if we want to stay the same and wallow in self-pity or break out of it and do something.

Life is meant to lived, not to be escaped.  We need to embrace life, live with involvement, live every bit of it, no matter how it is and keep working on it. And maybe live it with a bit of self-compassion and self-love. And with a bit of hope and optimism. The nature of life isn’t, “why bother?”, the nature of life is to be curious (note 1), is to get hurt and get back up again, the natural state of being is activity. Our brains are active even when we sleep. A child doesn’t give up because it hurt itself while trying to walk, it keeps on trying to walk.         We all need to aspire to be like that child. He decided he was going to give himself some time to mourn, some time to be sad, a fixed timeline, before going back to his old self. Live his sadness and then live his life anyway.

“Are you there with me?” Tyler asked, waving a hand in front of his face.

Jim looked up to see his best friend looking at him with concern.

“Yeah.” He smiled and nodded. Jim took a deep breath and affirmed, “I think I’ll be just fine.”

“Ah, great!” Tyler exclaimed clapping his hands together. “I know you are all about fitness, but honestly it is getting difficult for me. So can we order pizza without you making a long face, because I am really craving for one.”

Jim pouted, but went along anyway.

Sometimes you have to live without denial also. And to make other people happy too.

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Hey there! If you got to the end of the piece, I hope you enjoyed it! Do let me know what are your thoughts on the same in the comments below.

TMI – Jenny was first supposed to be a dog, you know… then I was like, okay I’ll make it a human.

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Note 1 – Reference – Book - Learned Hopefulness by Dan Tomasulo.