Fighting Human Nature, Fighting Ourselves
As a parent, you have no doubt come to realize that a large part of parenting is being sure to set appropriate boundaries for your children, and to enforce consequences for crossing such boundaries. Why? Because they need accountability.
And as a parent, you also have no doubt come to realize that an equally large part of parenting is trying to instill good habits in your children, whether with regard to teeth brushing or eating meals at regular times of the day, etc, and even against their own wishes and apparent priorities of the moment. Why? Because it’s good discipline for them.
Accountability and discipline are not popular topics of discussion in our current day culture. But they are, I believe, vital to our success in life in many ways, including our health.
I have historically had a love-hate relationship with my dad. He used to always tell me how life was going to unfold, and annoyingly, in the far majority of cases, he’s been more or less accurate – that part I hated. But whether as a result of his culture or his family or some other influence, I would say my dad is a bit of a philosopher. This part of him I did enjoy and as I grow older, I treasure more and more. One theme he frequently lectured me about was our human nature, and the constant battle we have against it – fighting against laziness or discontent or instant gratification, etc. In many different layers of our lives, we go through this internal conflict. It makes me think of the prophet Paul who writes in the book of Romans of the New Testament: “For what I want to do I do not do, but [instead] what I hate I do”. Don’t you feel like this sometimes? It’s like that cartoon caricature of an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, fighting for your verdict to act upon one impulse to act upon your better judgment, and another impulse to act upon the lesser judgment, but the one which you know seems to feel good in some paradoxical wanted-but-unwanted way.
Accountability and discipline, which I might word otherwise as “answering to someone else” and “maintaining good habits” (respectively) are, I would argue, not at all part of our human nature. Most of us have some issue or another that we cannot ever seem to be disciplined about. For me, perhaps the biggest impacting issue is my sleep – I always go to bed too late, depriving myself of valuable recharge-time. (My wife would say another issue is flossing.) Similarly, many people relate to poor disciplines with eating (too much or the wrong foods), exercise (the lack thereof), spending (excessively), television watching (excessively), or a number of other “bad habits”. And unfortunately, though we often recognize we could do better in these regards with some encouragement, support, and help from our family, friends, healthcare professionals and others, providing a backup plan to those all-too-often-failed attempts to depend on ourselves, too often our pride, stubbornness, or some other barrier inhibits us from being accountable to those who would otherwise be of valuable help to us.
But maintaining accountability and discipline are no doubt keys to success in life, and I am more and more aware of this as life continues on. In fact, I believe these are the tools to fight some common undercurrents in our society today which are dooming us to suffering and trials in many aspects of our lives. The recent and the obvious: Wall Street’s crisis has reflected our lack of financial discipline – we’ve been spending beyond our means, overextending our credit, racking up debt. The chronic and sometimes less obvious: obesity will soon be named as this nation’s #1 cause of preventable death and morbidity, overtaking tobacco abuse, reflecting our lack of eating and exercise disciplines – we’ve been eating beyond our limits, overextending our sedentary lifestyles, racking up fatty tissue. I would argue that accountability and discipline are what we need to restock in our lives in order to battle the American society’s overwhelming cultural drives toward impulsivity, instant gratification, and the “big and more is better” mentality, all of which undergird these two stated challenges, among others, in our lives.
With regard to your and my personal health, accountability and discipline are no less important. In this culture, where not fighting against the grain leads to the default status of obesity, maintaining disciplines of exercise and healthy eating habits are essential. And, knowing that the majority of us can’t rely on ourselves to maintain such disciplines over larger periods of time (not just in March, after the New Year’s resolutions have faded, but from year to year, season of life to season of life), seeing your doctor for regular physicals is a healthy form of accountability, as you step on that scale and engage in an evaluation of how your living has manifested amongst your body organs and tissues. (As a side note, this is not a plug to drive more office visits. It is a commonly held notion that health care providers of all sorts, including physicians, are notoriously poor at being held accountable ourselves for our own health, including having regular physicals.)
And so I urge and challenge everyone today, myself included: let’s be willing to be held accountable for our health, and strive for disciplines in our exercise and eating lifestyles. Let’s be willing to look ourselves in the mirror and ask the hard questions, and engage in the internal battle against our human nature. Over time, the battle lessens, I assure you. Let’s apply to ourselves some of those parenting skills we’ve developed and applied toward our children by allowing someone else to “parent” us in some of our health habits - let our doctors and friends who are health-conscious minded be part of our team of encouragers, life coaches, and cheerleaders as we seek a healthier mind and body. Apply some of those same learned parenting skills by remembering the importance and rewards of consistent and healthy habits, and with time, let these disciplines be a model for others, as we win over our human nature and take better control of our lives. With time, who knows, maybe some of these principles will spill over into other parts of our lives, and improve our financial, relationship, and other lifestyles too.
