The picture above is of my old belt, banana included for scale. Over the last 6 months I went from the belt hole three in from the left by the banana stem all the way to the holes I carved into it on the left of the picture. I’ve lost count of the number of pounds and the inches lost and I’m happier that way.

In the past whenever I lost weight it was for a reason. I was getting ready for a sport I was playing, or I was doing it for a girl, or I was getting ready to go away to college and wanted to make a good impression. As long as I had that goal, that target weight or that date I was hoping for, I would stay strong. As soon as I reached my goal, I would begin to slide back into old habits. I would relax my discipline. I would stop working out as much, get complacent, satisfied with where I was. In a few years I would be back where I started again, barely able to understand what had happened.

Now, I have no goal weight or thing I want to accomplish. I just want to be in better shape because I believe it will help me be a better version of myself. I want to live as long as I can to be able to enjoy as much of this world as I can. Ultimately, I view it as a journey, not a battle. A battle is designed to wear you down and make you miserable. All battles end. A journey is a way to enjoy yourself on your way to where you would like to be.

No, crab mentality is not about approaching life as a grouch, crabbing about all the things that are wrong. It refers to an interesting phenomenon with blue crabs. When they are in a bucket, if one of them climbs out to escape, the other crabs will reach up and pull it back down.

It’s as if to say, if I can’t go, no one can! The behavior carries over to humans as well. Something about us almost revels in seeing someone else try and fail. There are entire TV shows dedicated to picking people apart. For some reason, people love a fall from grace. People will snipe at another person’s success and belittle their achievements to bring them back down.

We should aspire the be the crab that lends a helping claw. If we see someone going for something we should encourage them and help them in any way we can, just as we would hope others would do for us if we were in that situation.  The world is not a zero-sum game where someone else getting something means that you won’t. The world is a huge, amazing place and there is more than enough to go around for us all.

Today the internet has taught me about the existence of a company in the UK that does 3D printing. You stand in the photo booth, get your picture taken, and they send you your figurine in 3 weeks. It’s expensive and completely useless, but the 8 year-old in me can’t help but think it’s awesome. It would be cool to have before and after weight loss ones. Or if you had kids, take them in their Halloween costumes each year as a memento. That would be pretty hilarious to look back on in 20 years.

“Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.”

– Barbara Johnson

They say that patience is a virtue and good things come to those who wait. For all of my better qualities, I remain hilariously impatient. I approach things earnestly and with sincerity. When I find something I enjoy, I often throw myself into with reckless abandon. Waiting is not something that comes naturally to me. But in life, all things are about balance. It’s about learning when to sit back and let things happen as they will instead of trying to hurry them along. All the desire in the world to see a flower won’t make it grow any faster, and there’s no sense in plucking it before it’s bloomed. Sometimes, the only thing is to let nature run it’s course.

Trust is an interesting thing. As I was looking for inspiration when I wanted to write about this topic, so much of what I was able to find was about the negative connotations of trust. How we can’t trust anyone in life other than ourselves, that trust is impossible to build and can be broken in an instant, never to be the same again. Trust is such a powerful thing and yet is seemingly so fragile.

What got me thinking about this topic was an Ira Glass comment in an episode of a This American Life podcast. He mentioned that he always feels like he’s one bad moment away from ruining relationships with everyone he knows. His co-host asked if he thought that about even his wife, and he said that yes, deep down he feels like if he says the wrong thing one time that everything could potentially fall apart.

It hit home with me. I realized I felt the same way for some reason. I’ve always held back things from people because I felt like I couldn’t trust them with it. It runs from simple things like tasks at work to deeper things like hiding the way I feel about something because I don’t want to upset another person or worry about how it could change how they looked at me. That all it would take would be one wrong thing to undo everything I had with someone.

It’s odd, because I know the things I keep to myself I wouldn’t care if another person shared with me. I’m learning we’re all humans in that way, and that people are a whole lot more receptive than I’ve given them credit for. Like all things, there’s a balance between being naïve and trusting indiscriminately and being closed off and quietly becoming bitter and cynical about people. Somewhere in-between is a middle ground; where you open up to and trust the right people, the people that matter, and you get a richer, fuller relationship as a reward. One that is based on who you are instead of a fabricated version of yourself you want everyone to see. You just need to be confident, take a chance and trust in them.

Have courage and be bold. When you figure out something you want in life, raise your hand and let the world know. No one will ever hand you anything in life, but the people who care can only help you when they know what you want.

Sushi is tremendous. I waited way too long in my life to try it, and even when I did it weirded me so much that I didn’t really enjoy it much. Just the knowledge of what I was eating and the different textures was too much for my brain to get past all at once. But, enough people raved about it that I was willing to give it another try. The next time I had it, something clicked. I was over that initial hurdle and I was able to just enjoy the flavor. Turns out, it was great!

It’s inspired me to always have a two-try rule with food I’ve never had before. It’s also made me more open to life in general. If sushi is that amazing and it took me that long to figure out, what else is out there waiting for me to discover it?! Approach things with an open-mind and an open heart, you’ll never know what you could find.

Ever since I was a little kid I’ve always really liked mythology. Things like the Roman, Greek and Egyptian gods and goddesses, fantastic creatures like the Chimera, Hydra, Phoenix and Cerberus, the Norse and Valhalla and Ragnarok. It’s incredible to me how cultures have created these stories to explain the things they could not understand, sneak in lessons about how your life should be lived, and give an identity to the things we fear most.

It’s a human thing to be afraid of the things we can’t see and comprehend. That’s what makes night so scary. In old maps of the world the Europeans drew scary beasts and wrote “Here Be Monsters” off the western coast because the ocean was this incomprehensible vast thing. People knew that Rupert was always a great sailor, that Rupert sailed off to the west one day and never came back, so Rupert was surely eaten by a Kraken. Let’s not go west any more! And that becomes the way of things. There is this unconquerable fear out there that keeps people from sailing off to their doom, which keeps people safe and whole and is generally an okay thing.

It goes on like this until one day when someone becomes desperate enough to figure out what is really out there. Their need for access to spices and money weighs more than their fear of being gobbled by a Kraken. Plus they’re pretty sure it’s just a really long trip and not filled with mythical sea beasts by this point. So off a brave band of heroes go. The kind of guys who eat scurvy for breakfast and bunk with death by night. They find out the journey is tough, but it’s not fighting a gigantic 200 foot tall beaked octopus tough, and the New World is born.

This brings me to Eve. I was wandering around the city this recently and stumbled on this young homeless woman with a dog sitting outside a store called the Garden of Eden. It was a scene that struck me. It was too much of a coincidence for me to ignore it, and it hit on the older brother in me, the person who wants to help people, and the guy who really likes dogs. I was watching her and I had a thousand thoughts running through my head. What could I possibly do to help her? I was angry that I wasn’t in a position that I could do anything meaningful for this person. What could have led to her being in this place? What could have been so bad or so wrong that living on the streets of New York and relying on the kindness of strangers was the last option left for this person?

As I was standing off to the side thinking about all this, a woman comes up. She gave off this yuppie, touristy kind’ve vibe. She stopped and was taking pictures of the girl and her dog, as if she was another tourist attraction on the way to the Flatiron Building. “Look Humphrey, a real live urchin! This one isn’t even as filthy as the other ones … I must have a picture!” … At least is wasn’t a selfie. Something about it repulsed me, and I have a face that betrays how I’m feeling. Eve looked over as I was putting on my best “just stuck an entire pack of sour patch kids in my mouth at once” face and laughed. It made me laugh too, and I took it as an invitation to go and talk to her. I offered to go and get her something if she wanted, since getting around with all her stuff and the dog must be tough. She said no, that she was alright.

We ended up talking for a little while. What we said isn’t really as important as what I remember feeling. Eve had problems in her life that were so big and so beyond her ability to face them that they became a dragon. They were a massive beast of sinew and scale, cunning wickedness and burning flame that no mere mortal could ever hope to face let alone get past. Whatever problems Eve has now; staying warm, getting enough food, staying safe, they were easier to face than that dragon.

It’s something we all do. There are things in life that seem to big for us to deal with. We create our own dragons. Our problems grow in our heads. We run through every worst case scenario and defeat ourselves 100 times before we ever even set foot in front of our problems. We are so beaten down that we can no longer even try. Instead of facing the dragon that we have convinced ourselves will beat us we take on other challenges or we create new problems for ourselves that we know deep down we can fix. We get these small victories to convince ourselves that we’re still capable, that even though we can’t face the dragon, we can still do something. That’s all well and good, but the dragon is still out there, still waiting, still growing larger waiting for the day when we have no choice, when desperation makes us face that which we fear the most, and we have to pray that our best case scenario is the best defeat out of the 100 that we imagined.

We are all blessed by fate. That we are given a chance at life is hitting the cosmic lottery. The impossible combinations of genetic material between our fathers and mothers that resulted in us being conceived and being given this brief fleeting opportunity to live as who we are is incredible. In the marathon of inheritance we were in a race against 100 million versions of ourselves. Nine months before we were born we were already champions. We owe it to the other us’s who didn’t get this amazing opportunity, to be the best we can ever be. There are 99.9 million versions of us that would give anything to have the problems that we have just so they could experience for one second what an apple tastes like. Never let an opportunity go by unchallenged that another version of you would have faced before it became something worse. We are born as heroes. Heroes are the ones who face the dragons.

Why do I run? It’s a miserable, uncomfortable thing. I’m pretty terrible at it and get little satisfaction from the actual act of running. I can walk forever, but as soon as I accelerate to a trot every member of the Board of Directors of my body launches into fits of rage and protest that puts the Boston Tea Party to shame. My mind is the worst culprit. It wants no part of cardiovascular exercise so it immediately pulls out the Playbook of Doubts and gets to work.

The battle is the reason why I run though. There is no one on this planet who is a bigger obstacle to me than myself. I am absolutely my own worst enemy. My mind is insidious. It knows all my weak points and what to think to get me to doubt myself. It gets me to question why I am doing the things I am doing and to want to give up. To not face the difficult things in life. When I run my inner monologue is a cacophony of doubt, hesitation, skepticism and mistrust so perfectly discordant that it could have been ghost-composed by Bach.

For every reason or inspirational thing I think of to get me to keep going, my brain has an answer for why I should stop. My whole body joins in the routine. My lungs betray me and my thoughts begin to align with every ragged breath. Just … STOP … it’s … HARD … knee … HURTS … why … PRETEND … isn’t … YOU … notta … RUNNER … they’re … FASTER … you … CAN’T … Every step becomes a contest of wills to see who will quit first, me or myself.

Right when the noise inside my head becomes nearly deafening, I hear it … ching … step … ching … step … ching … step. The sound of my keys in my pocket jingling with each step I take cuts through the nonsense. The whole Board stops the parade of uncertainty it’s been marching through my thoughts and all is silent except for … ching … step … ching … step. My body knew the answer all along. One step at a time, keep moving forward, one foot in front of the other. My body is proving my mind wrong with every step I take. Through all the madness it just kept going. Things are put into perspective and the Board slinks away having been humbled.

I run for those moments of clarity that help lay a bedrock of confidence that carries over to other things I do. Every time I start to waver, I remember those moments on the road going up a hill when I didn’t listen to the voice and kept going. I prove to myself every time I finish a run that I can’t give in to the doubts. I trust that I will find the way to wherever I’m going, it’s just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other long enough to get there.

One of my favorite comic strips as a kid was Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Calvin was a six-year old boy with a vocabulary and intelligence beyond his years. He has no filter and questions and ideas flow right from his brain to his mouth. Hobbes is his stuffed tiger that is alive to Calvin but a stuffed animal to everyone else. They would go on adventures together and talk about the world and why it is the way it is. It was great as a kid, and it holds up as the years go by. It’s always interested me how you can look back on things from your youth and have a whole new appreciation for them as an adult.

One of the strips that stuck with me is one where Calvin is digging a hole in his backyard. Hobbes questions why, and Calvin tells him he is looking for buried treasure. Hobbes asks what he found, and Calvin responds “a few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs”. The next panel shows a jubilant Hobbes saying “On your first try??” and Calvin exclaiming with a large grin that “there’s treasure everywhere!”.

As an adult I appreciated that this strip taught me that life is all about perspective. Adventure isn’t a thing you do, it’s a mindset you have. The ordinary becomes extraordinary depending on how we look at it. The world is full of everyday miracles just waiting for us to appreciate them. As you go through your day today, take a moment to appreciate that there are some incredible things going on around us. It’s Spring, flowers are blooming, the weather is getting warmer and the days a little longer each day. It’s a beautiful time to be alive.