Just One Step-Just Not Just Any Step

You've probably all heard the words, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," written by Confucius. And you've probably all heard variations on it.  "Every journey begins with a single step."  "The longest journey begins with a single step." Ad nauseum.  The problem is, like most great quotations that are pulled out of a context that will never be read by most people, this quote is missing vital information.  In this case, that information is, "Not Just Any Step."  Let me explain.

How many universal truths do you hear quoted so often throughout your life that they become a cliche to you before you've ever even read the author's entire context for the quote (if you ever do read the context)?  How many of these great quotes become hackneyed and overused to the point that they worse than nullify the quote's original meaning, they actual do damage to it?  I've come to the conclusion that this is because of that missing vital information.  Part of it is missing the context; what makes a great quote so great in the first place is often not actually those one or two sentences that strike a chord with the original reading audience.  It's the entire experience of the writing leading up to and away from that line or two, that just happens to *culminate* in those couple of lines.  But if the original audience had only heard the quote, and never the rest of the context, would it have resonated nearly as much?  No, I don't think so.  And that's why Confucius' excellent quote here has been so badly abused by those cheesy motivational posters all over dreary, depressing cube farms across the corporate world.  But the other part of it is that there are real secrets in this world.  There are true and honest-to-God secrets to success, and the problem is that we don't know the secret behind this quote.

It's not a conspiracy theory.  No one has set out to make this information secret.  On the contrary, it's right there in front of us!  Successful people, every day, in books and interviews and in their professional lives, scream from the rooftops the secrets to their success, because they really WANT to share their success with others, and they may as well be screaming it to us in a different language, because we simply haven't reached their level of enlightenment yet.  This enlightenment isn't an education level, or a level of experience or success.  This enlightenment is an internal change, a process, that we go through.  We enter into the cocoon a fat caterpillar whose only goal in life is to eat and eat a lot.  We come out on the other side an amazing, winged creature who, after shaking out our new wings for a bit and getting used to the idea, run and jump straight off of that twig we've been crawling on our entire lives without so much as a second thought.

THAT, my friends, is the One Step Confucius was referring to.  It's Not Just Any Step. 

The journey of a thousand miles, the journey of your life, the journey of your transformation from fat caterpillar to liberated butterfly, doesn't begin with just any single step!  The step you take out your door this morning to go to work, the same step you've always taken, is NOT the step that will take you on your journey!  Nor is it the first step to the grocery store you make every Saturday, and it sure as hell isn't that first of many steps you take every night from the couch to the fridge and back again.  The first step in your journey is the hardest and scariest step you'll ever take in your life.  The first step in your journey is the day you realize you haven't ever actually walked a step in your life.  Not a *real* step.  Not just *any* step.  But A Step On Your Journey.  The first step you ever take is the day you wake up from your "life" as you've lived it, when you wake up from the delusion that this is "all there is", when you wake up from the belief that if you just keep plugging away at your job/your home/your relationship/your kids, somehow you'll wind up in that vague hope you have for success.  The day you wake up and realize that you haven't lived a purposeful life, that you have used things like food or alcohol or whatever your personal crutch is to hide from the fact that you have no idea where your life is going, or how it got here, and you have no idea how to get it to end up looking the way you want it to look (and maybe you also realize you have no idea how you actually want it to look!).  THAT DAY is Your First Step.  Because that step is a move in your life you can't take back.  That day is a day that you can't unlive.  And that motion that you set forth is a motion that you cannot still.  You're on your journey, and you started it with Just One Step-Just Not Just Any Step.

Another universal truth that is important here is the idea that "you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been."  This isn't an actual quote, insofar as I can find, so much as it is one of those ideas distilled from many other quotes by many other literati.  Within this idea, this universal truth, though, is another one of those Real-Life Secrets obscuring its meaning.  And in this case, that secret is, You Haven't Been Anywhere (and that's why you're not going anywhere!).

In this modern world of opportunity, we live our whole lives in the smallest footprint believable.  Our circle (however much widened folks would have us believe it has been by the Internet, Social Networking, etc.) is incredibly small.  And we live miniature repeat caricature versions of our parents' lives, and their parents before them, and theirs before them.  The homes change, the faces change, the jobs change, the education level changes, but for the most part, the structure remains the same.  And we take it for granted that this is Our Dream.  The American Dream.  The problem is, it's not.  Our Journey is out there waiting for us, and here we are, ignoring The First Step and putzing around our kitchens.  It's no wonder we're all fat and unhappy.  We're frickin' BORED and we're hiding behind this modern facade of suburbia, normalcy, average Joe "success", to avoid facing the fact that THIS ISN'T THE LIFE WE WANTED.  This isn't, as Rick Warren calls it, a Purpose Driven Life.  This is meandering along until we die.  And that, my friends, is fucking scary.

You all are probably wondering at this point how all of this relates to my, or your, weight-loss.  I promise, it relates enormously.  As I mentioned before, "You can't know where [I'm] going until you know where [I've] been."   And up until last February, I'd never been anywhere.  My journey had never begun. 

I've lost count of how many steps I've now taken on my journey, but it's been quite a few, and I'm nowhere near done.  You all want advice on how to lose the weight, how to get back in shape, but I tell you, it's more than that.  You didn't get fat by accident, or even just by a few extra cheeseburgers, and you can't lose the weight and keep it off without understanding how you got here.  I can't tell you your own story, but I can tell you mine, and hope that, in the retelling, you find your "aha!" moment, you find the door that leads to your own First Step, and you can begin your journey too!  So bear with me over the next few posts as I explore with you Where I've Been, and together we'll find Where We're Going!  It's a step in the right direction, folks, it's just that it's Not Just Any Step.