Trust the process

I have problems with control.

Not in terms of other people, but in regards to how I approach my body, my life, my circumstances. I obsess with personal optimization; I calculate my hours by profit margins. Not a day goes by where I’m not aware of the declining numbers of weeks I possess. I think often about what my death would like: the statistical probability of it being cancer or heart disease, diabetes or dementia. The efficacy of each death. What would hurt, what would not. Whether I should begin figuring out what to do with my earthly possessions now (yes) rather than later.

Trauma is like that sometimes.

Grow up with enough insecurity and enough need to portent the future and you start looking for divination tools. Ways to determine the outcome of every silence, every sentence. Or in my case, ways to minimize the unknown. If I can reduce the number of possible outcomes, I can prepare better, future-proof harder.

But life isn’t like that.

The best you can do is commit to the present, to doing everything you can to progress whatever goal, or hope, or ambition you may have. After that, you let go. Like an arrow or a breath. You let go because there’s nothing else that you can do, really, save turn your attention to the next necessary step, taking lessons where you can.

‘Trust the process’ as the old adage go. You hear that line a lot especially if you’re a creative. Writers tell writers that all the time. You have to trust the process, that the despair you’re feeling won’t continue forever, that you’ll have time to tighten the writing in the next pass, that you can finish the book.

I cannot explain how much I struggle with that, and how much weightlifting has helped in terms of fixing that.

Weightlifting, at least for me, is a strictly enforced lesson in trusting the process. There’s no forcing the body beyond its immediate ability, not unless you want yourself injured. You do what you can before you regroup, take stock, examine the strategy for the upcoming sessions. You eat, you refuel. You rest.

Then you get up and you do it again.

(It helps too that weightlifting is rife with concrete metrics. My brain can say whatever it fucking wants, but it can’t argue against the numbers. Mathematical* fact absolutely does not lie.)

There are a lot of jokes about worshipping at the church of iron, but it has been teaching me a kind of faith. Not faith in the religious sense, but faith as it applies to the mundanely ineffable: that the fitness regime will whet the body, that the book will be worth its words, that the plant will grow, that a relationship will be worth those first frightened weeks of trust.

And if it turns out that the outcome isn’t what you wanted, that’s okay too. You’ve done what you can. You can let go of the rest.

*not a damn word, theoretical mathematician friends. Not a damn word.

As always, a cat photo: