I am embarking on a quest that
would put Don Quixote to shame. I plan to whittle three and a half inches off
my waist. If that’s not the impossible dream, I don’t know what is.
I started by hiring a personal
trainer. I found Tracy teaching the Body Pump class at my gym—a do-it-yourself
boxing class. There is nothing more empowering than pumping the air with no heavy
boxing gloves, no opponent and no way to get hit back. You win every “fight”!
I signed up…but what I got,
at Tracy’s insistence, was a hula hoop.
She said, “You need it to
strengthen your core. Every boxer can hula hoop.”
Not this one.
When I was a roly-poly five-year-old,
I was the only kid on the block who couldn’t hula hoop, even though I had an
amazing hoop that my Dad bought for me at the circus.
This hoop, oh this hoop—it
lit up and had flashing lights.
I played with it in our
postcard-sized Brooklyn backyard, mostly pavement, with one lonely peony bush.
“Don’t hit the peony bush,” my mother admonished. No worries there. I was all
hat and no cattle. I could make the hoop rotate only three times, mostly around
my legs, and then it would fall to the ground.
At the gym with Tracey, I
repeated the performance of 65 years ago, nearly move by move. Three spins and
the hoop fell. This time it was a grey plastic weighted hoop that Tracy assured
me prize fighters used to get fit. I was in “hoop a dupe” mode, when she said, “Don’t
worry. You have been moving side to side—it’s back to front. Now that you know
how it will be easy.”
Now, in my experience,
merely knowing how is the booby prize.
I know how to ride a bike,
but I can’t ride one. I know how to lose weight, but I don’t do it. I know how
to save money, but my credit card would tell you otherwise. Progress in
anything that does not come naturally takes more than knowledge.
It takes courage to fail.
Samuel Beckett wrote in Worstword
Ho!, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No
matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Of course, he was a pessimistic
curmudgeon, but the human animal needs encouragement, and the sentence stuck as
a mantra for achievement. Anyway, I always liked the line.
Thomas A. Edison who failed
a thousand times before perfecting the lightbulb is a bit harsher on us: “Many
of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to
success when they gave up.”
My favorite line on failure
comes from Winston Churchill, “Success is not final, failure
is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
So what would it take for me
to master something physical that I never learned to do as a kid, like swim,
ski, ride a bike or hula hoop?
While kids can generally
pick up anything by just watching and trying (unless you’re me with a hula
hoop), experts suggest that older adults take it easy when learning a new
physical skill, follow protocols, stay safe and learn little-by-little.
Some of my favorite gurus…
No matter how many times I watched their YouTube tutorials, I never did learn to swim, ski or ride a bike. I’m resourceful, so I snowshoe (with skiers shouting “stay on the track”), long-distance walk (with bikers shouting “to your right”) and scuba dive (with fish saying…well, they just laugh.) Still, I felt I never mastered the real thing.
Not this time.
This
time I had a major goal little addressed in discussing the motivation of folks
of a certain age. That motivator is (wait for it)…avenging the past—or in my
case my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. P.
I
was a chubby kid. I remember standing up straight, looking down and trying to
see my toes. I couldn’t—my stomach was in the way. One day, in fourth-grade
vocabulary class, Mrs. P said, “Let’s learn the difference between the words plump
and obese.” “Stand up, Sally. Class, Sally is an example of plump.”
Today,
the Parent Police would come and arrest that woman. How dare she make the kid a
spectacle and then call her plump in front of the whole class?
I, however, was delighted.
Why? Because I was not the one put on show, so I did not have to suffer such
humiliation. Until…
“Now obese means fat.
Adriane, stand up.”
Through the years, I have
found that such monsters exist in many positions and colors and shapes. I have learned
to see that as their problem, not mine. But not in fourth grade.
Apparently, at age 70, I am
still back in elementary school, hoping to one day see my toes.
The remainder of this story must be seen, not read. Check this out.
Ask yourself, Is there a
skill that has eluded me all my life? If so, find a compelling motivator to
gain that skill. Go for it. Muster your courage, and try again and again. You may
master it or fail better. To me, either is progress.
Adriane Berg is a keynote speaker on boomer-biz and lifestyle, agetek, longevity and aging, and host of the syndicated radio show Generation Bold The Fountain of Truth.
