Pay Attention
Posted in Main, Personal Health on October 26th, 2008 by MarkusJust a quick an update for myself, since I have found that the blog works well as a memory agent. Last Monday, went to the doctor for an unrelated issue, weighed 247 lb. I note that I weighed 222 last March 25th. I resumed smoking about two days later. So I managed, it seemed, to gain back about 25 pounds in the seven months I went back to smoking. I told this to my doctor, who noted that this is the opposite of the usual case. I agreed, but said something like “I think I just took my eye off the ball in terms of my overall health.”
He nodded as if this made sense and said, paraphrased, if you were to go into Books-A-Million, into the self-help section, and you could condense everything down, you would come up with two words–then he opened his hands like a book and said, “Pay Attention.”
I stared at him as I felt that tingly, “this-is-a-moment” feeling. Yeah. That sounds right to me.
Today I weighed at Winn-Dixie, on my usual scale, and came up at just a tad below 240 lb. This was without my keys, wallet, and cellphone; in shorts, and in the morning before eating, unlike at the doctor’s. Plus I have certainly been motivated to walk more, eat less, and I’ve been fighting the smoking more. In fact–but maybe that’s another post. I will say that in the last couple of weeks my more positive attitude has been making a comeback; kind of fitfully, like the TV used to do when Dad would go outside and turn the antenna. Snow, the signal coming in and out, before you yell, “there! Right there!” And, God bless him, he could hear me back in those days, thirty years ago and more. I like to believe he can hear me even better now.
I love you, Dad.
