I’m a big fan of Buckminster Fuller who’s book I Seem to Be a Verb takes its name from the following passage:

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.

Conceptually, that’s a pretty important concept I think. The idea that there are no nouns in nature, only verbs, only processes; that a person is not a known quantity and therefore not subject to the limitations that come with a single definition.

For the last few months I’ve definitely fallen off of the weight-loss path I’d set for myself. I set goals, and failed to meet them. I started each day with the best intentions, but ate poorly. It wasn’t long before I was updating the site less frequently, and shortly after thereafter, not updating at all.

There were, of course, outside factors that contributed to recent my struggles – Holidays gave me an excuse to eat more, technical issues kept the site unavailable to me, external stress factors wearing me down, etc. I’m not making excuses, mind you, as I am the one that made poor choices, these are just some the justifications I used to make them.

Now for the stupid part – those justifications have nothing to do with why I haven’t gotten back on track. For the last few weeks I’ve really been anxious to start tracking my food and hitting the gym again, but I haven’t, and the reason I haven’t is because of this site.

I realized last night that the notion that I was somehow behind where I ‘should’ be and needed to somehow ‘catch up’ was the primary reason that I wasn’t posting anymore. It felt that, before I could just start again, there had to be some sort of an explanation as to why I’d stopped. I’d become bound by some definition of what I thought my weight loss and this site were supposed to be, and I felt guilty for not living up to it. I’d let my weight loss become a thing – a noun, rather than a process.

It’s the reason I didn’t post about the chicken & garlic pasta I made at home, or I didn’t post pictures of my new gym headphones, or post about how (despite not really losing any weight on the scale) I am down yet another loop on my belt. I kept waiting to write some post explaining why I’d been gone first. Oddly enough, the minute I realized that I don’t need to have a reason for not posting recently, this post more or less wrote itself.

Now I’m off to the gym.