Mark McNease

I recently spent several weeks with a cold—or a flu, or a sinus infection, or some dreadful combination of them all. A cough still lingers, the voice still gives out if I talk for more than a few minutes. This kind of seasonal illness has been with me for most of my life. It brings discomfort and frustration, dread at what awaits me in my elder years, and the perfect excuse to start reaching for those comfort foods and behaviors I believe I’m entitled to under the circumstances because I deserve this. It’s a way to quickly short-circuit any deeper or prolonged analysis of what’s really happening: I’m in a sate of discomfort, and I want something to make me comfortable that doesn’t require more effort than getting it from an ice cream container into my mouth.

Mark McNease

I’m on a mission. How many times have we said this to ourselves? How many times have we told it to the people around us? Being on a mission is a way of focusing our attention and energy onto whatever that mission is. For a few people there may be one overriding mission in their lives—to be an actor, a writer, a doctor, the raiser of a family—but for most of us there are multiple missions that change over time. We may be on a mission to earn a degree during our college years, or to succeed without one. We may be on a mission to raise children, or to live our fullest lives without them. We may be on a mission to lose weight, or further our careers, or even to find the kind of inner peace that surrenders missions altogether! That’s a little closer to nirvana than I will likely ever come, so I accept that I have missions. The challenge is finding the best ways to pursue them.

It’s okay to have a goal, to see a particular destination in the distance that we work our way toward. A mission can be as narrow as arranging an event and having it go off to our satisfaction, or as wide and critical as surviving our formative years. I’ll admit I’d been on a mission to get through high school and leave the town I’d grown up in. It was among the most difficult missions of my life, but it is a mission accomplished. I made it. I thrived. I found other, less life-threatening missions to devote myself to.

Mark McNease

If you spend much time watching television or browsing the Internet, you’ll quickly realize what advertisers have been telling us all our lives: that there is something wrong with us. Vast fortunes are made by people convincing us we’re naturally defective and the best way to repair our damaged selves, if they can be repaired at all, is by using whatever product they’re selling. Hair loss? They’ve got the cure. Overweight? Try one of dozens of programs, apps and plans guaranteed to slim us down and give us a fighting chance of at least liking ourselves, if love is too much to hope for.

We’re told so often, for so long, that something is wrong with us that we internalize it early in life. Good, supportive parenting is to be admired and encouraged, but it’s often the exception to the rule. Too many parents discourage their children’s curiosity and self-expression, choosing to limit them instead, often because they’d been limited themselves. We grow up being much more familiar with don’t, can’t, won’t, than we are with do, can, will, or try. Too many parents see their children as extensions of themselves, including their own disappointments and unmet expectations. They want sons to play sports, girls to keep flower-covered diaries. They seek to create only slightly altered versions of themselves in the adults their children grow up to be.

Mark McNease

Our bodies are often the first to tell us when something isn’t right, when something needs attention. They begin speaking to us almost as soon as we find ourselves in this strange environment we call our lives: they tell us we must breathe within moments after emerging from the womb; they tell us we must rid ourselves of waste, first with the abandonment of an infant, and later with the control we’re taught and that eventually determines much of how we function in the world. Our bodies tell us when change is upon us, in stages that can be as frightening as adolescence, or as sudden as a broken bone, or as marvelous as a first sexual response.

Our bodies are constantly speaking to us. Unfortunately, we often refuse to listen, believing we know better than our bodies, or being unable to understand what they’re telling us, or simply denying the truths they speak. Bodies are wild and natural, and taming them sometimes comes with a very high price. But we can begin to hear what they tell us, and by taking their advice we can live a freer, easier existence less burdened by pain and uncertainty.