I Wish

4.21.20

I wish I didn’t have to exercise this morning.

After my alarm goes off – and after I’ve hit the snooze two or three times – I’m pure lizard brain. It’s all instinct and desire and grumpiness; it takes a few minutes for rational thought to come back on line.

In fact, I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror putting toothpaste on the brush before logic returned. I’d once again offered my whining, complaining wish to the cosmic void – damn, I really wish I didn’t have to exercise this morning – when the reply showed up from the upper stories of the mind.

If you don’t exercise, you will inevitably decay and have a feeble, limited old age. You’re not getting any younger, you know.

Rational brain is annoyingly patronizing.

Fine, replied lizard brain. I’ll clarify: I wish I LIKED to exercise.

Undaunted, rational brain had a fast come-back for that. If you LIKED to exercise, you wouldn’t need Barbara and the Body Dynamics team. You’d have exercised all your life and relished it.

And Jeezum Crow – ain’t that the truth? By my age in life, all the easily-fixed character flaws have been ground down. Don’t bite your nails. Stop sharing everyone’s secrets. Quit offering to help strangers who don’t need any help.

(Still guilty of all three – but working on it.)

What’s left are the recalcitrant, dug-in-deep character flaws that are rooted like a tree stump. You’re going to need a truck to get that one out. Or maybe a backhoe.

And I just don’t like to exercise.

So if the genii appeared to grant me a wish, what would I REALLY wish for? When I’m so longing to crawl back into that lovely bed and pull up the covers and curl up and hug the feather pillow and burrow down and purr like the cat in a sunbeam??

I guess I would wish for the strength of character – the determination – to haul it out of bed, stuff myself into some Lycra, and make it to the next Body Dynamics appointment, where Barbara’s energy (or Chip’s charm) will carry me through one lone stinking hour out of the 24 in which I can give my body what I know it needs, instead of what it thinks it wants.

Just a little determination. That’s all I’m wishing for.

And – poof! – here I sit, stuffed into Lycra and eating a nutritious breakfast, ready to sign on to a zoom session with Barbara.

Huh. Wish granted.

And I never got to see the handsome genii! Hang on – don’t I get THREE wishes, Will Smith??