12W12S11: Ash Wednesday

So. Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and the start of that time of year when people like me (i.e., Catholics, or at least hypothetical Catholics, or at least susceptible to Catholic guilt) generally make promises to themselves that they will change their wicked ways, make sacrifices, give up a particular vice, try to become better people, for just a little while at least.

Or, as I have been thinking about it lately: they're doing for the next six weeks what I've been doing for the last ten months.

I sound like I am bitter, but I'm not. Not really, anyway. I mean, I can tell you as well as anyone else how good it is to make changes in your life. Cut back on the caffeine, switch to diet soda, eat a healthy breakfast, get more fiber, drink more water, measure your portions, exercise regularly (or at least more often than "never"). This is basically what I've been doing since May -- and by the way, has it really been that long already? almost a year? yowza! -- and in that time I've dropped around 70 lbs. The cumulative result of any number of small positive changes really adds up over time.

But that's where I have my problem with Lent: it's just not enough time for the small positive changes to really amount to much. Lent is 46 days long if you start counting today and go through Easter Sunday, just 6½ weeks from now, and then almost everyone abandons their "resolutions."

(Yes, I know everybody thinks that it's 40 days long, but everybody is wrong -- it's actually 46 days, but Sundays don't count as "days" of Lent, and Lenten sacrifices need not apply because Sundays are not supposed to be days of fasting, but it's not like the calendar stops counting. [And if we're going to be all technical about it, I guess I should mention that Lent actually runs from Ash Wednesday through the Lord's Supper, exclusive, which means it doesn't actually start until tomorrow, and it runs until Holy Thursday -- so Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday themselves do not count as days of Lent, either, so ... minus four days, minus the six Sundays in there, carry the one, divide by the square root of seventeen ... that makes Lent itself actually 36 days long, although the Lenten Season is 46 days long. {And I bet nobody thought I paid attention in Catholic school, huh?}])

My point -- and yes, I do have one, shut up! -- is that I don't think 6½ weeks is long enough for anyone to make permanent lifestyle changes. It's a great place to start (I look back at what I was eating when I was 6½ weeks into the 12-Week 12-Step that turned into whatever the hell this has turned into, for me, and I can see that I was well on my way at that point, even though I bet I was eating about 1½ times as much food then as I am eating now), but it's just that: a start. You can't change everything in 6½ weeks, and since most people go right back to what they were doing in the first place as soon as they open up their chocolate marshmallow bunny heads first thing on Easter morning, I would argue that they don't actually change anything.

Lots of people put themselves on dietary restrictions for Lent: no soda, no chocolate, no caffeine, no whatever. I think this is fine on the whole, but why limit your self-improvement to just these 6½ weeks? Limiting my intake of stuff that got me into "trouble" has been a big help for me on this path. But I had to limit my intake of that stuff forever. And that wasn't all I did. I have always found positive activity, doing something, to be more helpful and ultimately more productive than not doing something else. Instead of just doing without things that are bad for you, perhaps it might be better to add in something that is more healthful.

So instead of giving something up for Lent -- I only eat 1,200 calories a day anyway, so it's not like I have a whole lot of room to cut much out without keeling over -- I'm going to work very hard on feeling more positively about what I am doing, and I am just going to keep on doing it. It's working. I look better, I feel better (most of the time). Maybe I am not well, not entirely, not yet, but I am better. And isn't that supposed to be the point?