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I don’t pride myself on being intelligent. I have found that true intelligence lies in possessing the ability to identify your ignorance. Unfortunately, lots of folks I meet need to let the “smart” move away from their ass to their brain, with a pit stop at the soul. Yet I don’t think most people’s arrogance is a malicious act, to hurt anyone. I believe it’s because we’re all defensive over our weakness and it troubles us rather than alerting us to what our task truly needs to be.
I have told you many times in the jonathots that human beings consist of the heart (our emotions), the soul (our more spiritual side, a mind (our brain and the control center to our bodily functions) and a strength (which is the human form with all of its components and hardware).
About a week ago I had a tremendous revelation–like most such epiphanies, other people probably thought of it years ago and I just stumbled upon it on my way to the barn. May I present my thought? Each of us has one weakness. I don’t know whether it’s genetic, spiritual or part of the natural order–but it is our “cross to bear.” The question that remains is whether we’re going to climb up on that cross to crucify ourselves, or instead, whether we will create an awareness of our weakness and gear our lives in a direction to play that Achilles heel to our advantage.
My weakness is my body. I was dealt a hand of genetic mumbo-jumbo. I have heart disease and diabetes in my family. I have genetic predisposition to obesity. Apparently, it’s essential for me to be bald. Now, I knew this early on. Truthfully, realizing our weakness does not constitute victory over the situation–because the fact of the matter is, if you’re like me and have a weakness in your body, you can start feeling sorry for yourself very strongly, which drags your emotions into the pit as well. Once your emotions are swallowed up, you find very little of a spiritual dynamic for improvement, so your faith wanes. When your faith wanes, your brain takes over with doomsday proclamations, causing you to be less sharp mentally and to come across dull and uncaring. So as you can see, one weakness–in my case, a physical one–if it is not isolated, can quickly own your entire body.
It’s the difference between carrying your cross and dying on one.
Fortunately for my soul, heart and mind, I did not become defensive over having a weak body. Early on I realized that what I ate was not nearly as important for making me slender and beautiful as it was to keep me from killing myself and infiltrating the other parts of my being, which did not need to suffer from my innate weakness. With the body I have been given, I shouldn’t still be alive at sixty years of age. I applied two very simple principles to the situation:
1. Don’t fight the weakness. When you try to turn your weakness into a strength or an excuse, you miss the point. You already have three other strengths, so what you want to do is to keep your weakness from overwhelming your other parts. I have been fat all my life–but I’ve never become emotionally fat, spiritually fat or mentally a fathead. Once you stop resisting the notion that you have a weakness and resenting the hell out of it, you can actually find the power to use that weakness to your advantage.
2. Once you calm yourself down and realize that weakness is common to all of us and is what makes us part of the human family, you can start working from the ground up. For me that was easy. Since my particular cross to bear is physical, I went back to what makes the human body more profitable to its own cause–food, exercise and nutrition. It’s about eating what comes out of the ground. Everything that flowers from the earth is high in vitamins and minerals and low in fat and calories. Everything that doesn’t come out of the ground normally is high in fats and sugars and lower in nutrients. Once I understood this, I worked on my taste buds instead of developing arguments against the reality of the earth system. And because of that, I am still here today.Even though I have had occasions to overeat animal fats, sugars, salts and starches, I have certainly, over my lifetime, eaten more fruits and vegetables and things from the ground up rather than the other choices.
You have to decide where you’re coming from. If your weakness is emotions, then from the ground up you need to live a life of great humor and transparency. If you have a weakness in the spiritual realm, where the things of faith seem illogical and meaningless, then you should address that weakness by finding the most practical application in the everyday life to discover the presence of God. If your brain is your problem, then you should find the chemical imbalances or address the learning disorders, and using reasonableness and patience, attempt to “tune up” that great, fleshy computer.
If we didn’t have a weakness, we would continue to try to dominate each other, and human existence would be a stand-off instead of a fellowship. And let’s be honest–the most obnoxious people in our lives are those who believe they are strong in everything when everybody else knows their true limitation.
From birth, my body has been my adversary. It will be with me until the day I die, when it more or less becomes “dusted off.” So I spend my time using my emotions, spirit and mind to counteract the weakness in my body, providing my strength what it needs from the ground up–fruits, vegetables and everything that sprouts from the earth. (A golden nugget–if it grows in the earth, eat a lot of it. If it walks on the earth, well … more often than not, walk away from it.)
Can it really be this simple? Well, it had better be. Otherwise, none of us will ever be intelligent enough to figure it out.
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