When I was a kid some of us used to drive way out into the Alabama back-woods in my granddad’s Chevy K5 Blazer.
Oftentimes the roads weren’t much but two ruts in red clay and muddy to boot. If there’d been any rains you’d creep up on mud puddles with no way to tell how deep they were. We’d have to stop to figure out if the old Blazer could charge through without getting stuck.
About half the time we got stuck.
Most of the time we could get it un-stuck ourselves with a few minutes of redneck ingenuity.
Then there were the other times when it called for a little assist.
This was long before cell-phones, you understand, and out where we were it’s doubtful even today you’d find any service.
If you weren’t too far out, you’d usually bump into somebody who could give you a nudge on your way.
One time that involved a dune-buggy driven by a nurse I knew from my doctor’s office. Another involved a red Camaro IROC and a tow-rope. Why this was out in the deep woods on a muddy trail is a question only Southerners will know the answer to.
Now, you wonder about this.
How are you going to get your truck stuck in the mud 20 miles from the nearest highway, which is itself 15 miles from the nearest town?
This is a totally avoidable problem.
But then you’re out there with the 4-wheel-drive and there’s that damn mud puddle.
You just can’t help yourself.
You ever hear that joke about the redneck’s last words?
“Y’all watch this.”
I tell you from first hand experience it is true.
There’s a powerful principle of human behavior in that story.
We, you and me and all of us human beings, are often the greatest source of our own problems.
We can’t always see that. Carl Jung wrote about the projection of the Shadow, which is when we hide all the nasty parts we don’t like about ourselves and project them on to other people and events.
What drives you crazy, makes you angry, and otherwise evokes strong emotions about other people is something about yourself that you don’t like and haven’t acknowledged.
That’s worth chewing on right there, in a time when pointing the finger at everyone else is virtually the national past-time.
If your life is full of unwanted drama, the drama is inside you.
Focus in on your health, fitness, and nutrition goals, and you’ll find the same.
If you aren’t getting what you want, the first place to start is inside yourself.
I’m speaking marketing sacrilege by not offering to remove the blame and shift responsibility on to the fashionable Not Your Fault of the hour.
So be it.
Justifying present beliefs, desires, choices, behaviors, and habits is why people get into unwanted situations to begin with.
If you want to be different you have to be different.
No one is done any favors by removing accountability, even if all the marketer bros swear that people only act in response to present pains.
That’s true enough as it goes.
But a person who won’t take responsibility for the contributions they make to their own lives won’t change anything regardless of what I say to them or what I sell them.
I had a conversation with a woman the other day who swore up and down that she couldn’t stop training so hard as she was. She was well intended, and her workout approach wasn’t that terrible. But at her age, and with her competing life-stresses, she was doing too much for what she could handle and I told her so.
“But I don’t feel like I did anything if I don’t train that hard.”
How you feel is a lie. What works and what makes you feel tired, these are two different things.
Do you think it registered? I’m not a gambler but I know a bad bet when I see one.
She’ll collapse into exhausted despair and a tub of ice cream before she’ll change what she’s doing, and even then the odds aren’t in her favor.
That’s the kind of animal we’re dealing with. That’s the kind of animal you and I are.
Easily fixed, even trivial, but many simply won’t do it.
You can just stop. You don’t need permission or a new research paper or a guy in a labcoat to make it okay.
Do you have your own redneck mud puddle?
What obstacle are you creating for yourself? Could you stop right now if you wanted?
Matt Perryman