Hi There,
Welcome back to Kat & Tshepi blog. We hope you had a good week. Our week was not so great, it was a really tough week. We found ourselves dealing with multiple unforeseen circumstances, both our kids caught the flu and were really sick, and work pressure was sky high for both of us at the same time. We don’t deal well with pressure, and to avoid it we do our best to plan, prepare and complete tasks in advance. But sometimes life is not kind to our plans and preparedness, it blows everything out of the water and leaves a chaotic and disarrayed state of reality which requires us to test our agility to adapt and survive. This is a huge challenge and an invasive conundrum for people like us who prefer to be in control and operate in a more structured existence.
Taking care of our sickly kids is a challenge and has always been a painful experience ,it destabilizes the core of our existence 😦 . And dealing with sickness whilst trying to manage our mounting work demands and pressure was hard, an undesirable double whammy. We normally thrive in pressured situations but we really dislike it and avoid it at all costs, and this week was one of those situations that we could not avoid but had to wear our high pressure hats and enter survival mode. Unfortunately, in the survival mode there are sacrifices that have to be made, something has to give, and in our case it was our planned training and our nutrition plan.
In this week, we could only complete 3 of our planned 8 workout sessions, this was a big hit as we have been building up and maintaining training consistency for the past few weeks. Another big hit was our nutrition, on entering the survival mode, our emotion runs quite high and one of the consequences of this is seeking comfort from food. We sought some comfort and coping ability from foods, and in turn this affected our meal plans drastically and resulted in us consuming foods that are not on our plan, and these are not so ideal type of food for weight loss. The unforeseen circumstances of this week affected our normality and comfort, but we accept that it is the reality of life. This bring us to this week’s topic “When life happens”.
1. When life happens
The circumstances we found ourselves in this week, although not so palatable and ideal, was a reminiscence of our predisposition to seeking control in all aspects of our lives. Control dictates that we want things to go our own way and as we have planned, we therefore invest time in planning our way and pledge full allegiance to those plans by attaching our emotions. In doing this, we are consciously investing efforts in creating and improving our existence, which is good and admirable. Unfortunately, we unconsciously attempt to secure control and be in charge of all aspects of our lives, even those aspects we really don’t and cannot have control over.
A famous quote by John Lennon stated “life is what happens when you are busy making plans”, such food for thought. Indeed, life happens, it calls the shots, it is independent of anyone’s plans, and it is certainly beyond anyone’s control. When we accept the reality of life, that we have no control over it, we begin to realize that our efforts in planning our lives should not be an attempt to control life but to put ourselves in a position where we are flowing with the currents of life and not against them. Our plans therefore, are not there to dictate our lives but to be our references points in flowing with life. This suggests that we plan to easily flow with the waves of life, but when life changes its flow against our anticipation, we then easily adapt our plans to flow with the new waves of life.
Our weight loss and fitness journey is made up of plans to achieve our target, these were fixed, guaranteed and sealed. But we now realize that these plans were made with a certain anticipated flow of life and if this flow changes then we should not be troubled and offer resistance, instead we need to change course and leverage the force of life’s currents to spear us to our goal, albeit in a limited and slow pace. It seems to be more beneficial then to adapt our plans to life than to enforce them on life, the life which we have no control over. Our unforeseen circumstances in this week were not as per our anticipation, they changed the flow of life as we know it, what we then did was to adapt our plans to the circumstances. We did not enforce our planned training and nutrition, we reduced these plans to acceptable levels based on our circumstances. In doing this we allowed ourselves to live life on its terms and not to burn out trying to live on our own terms. We remembered that the purpose of our journey is to enhance life and not to detract from it.
That’s it for this week, we have learned to allow life to happen and work within the limits of our circumstances, small progress is still progress. In the coming week, we are hoping to resume our normal training and eat according to our meal plans because our kids are getting a lot better (we thank God so much for this) and the work pressures have subsided, we are ready to go again. With 2 weeks left before the end of our journey, we hope to make good progress. Until next week, stay blessed.
Kat & Tshepi
Kat & Tshepi 