Stress, stretchy pants, and mutation
One of the tenets of Enlytened – is fitness. Having a sense of wellbeing in relation to your body. I’ve always struggled with fitness and didn’t exactly inherit the Dwayne Johnson genes from the deeper end of my families genetic pool. I like most people that struggle, have my bigger body clothes, and my smaller body clothes when transitioning from imbalance to balance and back again with regards to fitness inside of my own Enlytened journey.
I’ve noticed something though. There’s a third category of clothes in my closet. The stretchy clothes. I couldn’t help but think on them this morning during my quiet time today and draw parallels to bigger versions of sweat pants and elastic waist bands in so far as personal growth was concerned.
The clothes I love that fit me well are feedback devices. Boundaries and constraints. A non-numerical scale of sorts. They impart pressure and stress on my body when I am imbalanced. Push back gently at first and not so gently later on as I defer physical activity to mindless Netflix binging and stress eating. They are a border for me. They say, “you are here.” I am accountable to my smaller body clothes in that sense of the stress they impart and feedback to me.
I was thinking how Covid-19 reacted to the stressors of vaccines. How when the virus came up against host after host with no reaction or receptive fertile lungs to infect, the feedback it received forced it to change. To mutate. We got the Delta and the Omicron variants as a result. Boundaries are stressors which imbue the inspiration to change. If you don’t change at this boundary, there are consequences. For the virus, it’s death. With regards to clothes, it’s nakedness.
There are boundaries in balance, all throughout Enlytened. Push too far financially and your children stop talking to you. Go too far the other way, and debt collectors start talking to you. Boundaries and balance are linked together in that sense, and stressors are something I rely on and sometimes crave as I get older. Letting go of the elastic in my life is hard though. I want to change however and mutate into something greater than I was yesterday. Today I’m thinking about where the elastic is outside of my closet. What’s stretchy in my faith? In my family? Where are the boundaries that balance me there?