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Growing Pains
April 28, 2004
Welcome to Change Your
World!
Hello. My name is
Courtney Huntington, and I am the founder of Change Your World.
My wife and I have begun
to take a Pilates exercise class together. It is by far the most
challenging exercise I've ever undertaken. Some of the exercises are
nearly impossible for me to do. I become sore in ways I didn't know
were possible. Sometimes the pain in a particular muscle is too much
for me, and I give out. Yet I don't stop attending class or exercising.
Life is full of tough
choices and difficult circumstances. We all face them. No one avoids
them entirely. No one wants a life that has nothing but difficulty,
however. We want to have times of peace, rest, and relaxation, too. If
that's all we want, though, we will be sorely dissatisfied, because
being without any kind of challenge means stagnance and, ultimately,
death. Some think of stagnance as merely being neutral, neither getting
better or worse, but stagnance is actually a state of decay. Stagnance
indicates that there is no motion, but what living being is there that
doesn't move? Webster's New World College Dictionary
defines stagnant as "without
motion or current; not flowing or moving; foul from lack of movement."
Life and health require a flow of fresh air and water. That applies
just as much to the spiritual realm as it does to the physical.
Growth always requires a
little discomfort. Because of the way the physical universe was
designed, we must constantly renew and refresh ourselves, which means
we shed old, dead particles and take in new, vibrant particles. This is
a continual process. We're either getting better or getting worse. If
we have no positive transformation, then we must—by nature—be
experiencing negative transformation. The old phrase, "no pain, no
gain," though often misapplied, conveys much truth.
At our core, we all know
this is true, yet we are all lazy or fearful at some point. So we avoid
pain because we don't like it. Pain, by definition, is unpleasant. Yet
we all realize that we must experience some pain, and we choose
accordingly. Every adult has experienced the growing pains of
adolescence. Those pains are sometimes physical, sometimes mental,
sometimes emotional.
When I was in college, I
wasn't always the best student. I tended to be overly meticulous. I
haven't entirely overcome this characteristic, but I have learned to
channel this trait toward positive, effective ends. When I was working
on my Masters Degree, I struggled to develop a thesis. I kept finding
new interesting works that applied to my topic, and I hardly felt I
could leave them out of my research. When I sat down to write the
essay, I was often hindered by my "felt" need to get it just right,
with everything neatly arranged. My major professor encouraged me to
approach my writing another way. "When you sit down to write," she
said, "just type. That's all writing is, anyway: typing."
Unfortunately, I didn't learn this lesson until after I had completed
my degree. I never handed in my thesis; instead, I took the degree
without it.
The lesson was hard to
learn, and for me, it took failing to complete my project to make me
learn the lesson. Others might have learned the lesson without so much
pain; I had to feel the pain of that failure to fully understand the
lesson. Without that failure, I might not have grasped the real value
of getting the job done right by doing what the job needed, not what I
needed. Some tasks require more detail than others. I was guilty of
fussing over the unimportant details.
Those mental and
emotional pains lead to real growth for me. You might have needed less
pain to understand the lesson. We all have those lessons that require
more effort for us than for others, and the lessons are different for
different people. Sometimes we choose the pain, in order to reach a
goal. Other times, the pain seems to choose us. Either way, if we're
honest, we'll see that when we view the situation properly, the pain
was important for our growth.
Pilates is important for
my growth. The pain is necessary for me to improve my physical health.
I am choosing this pain. That's why I keep going, even when it hurts.
The reward is worth the pain.
With many blessings and
wishes for successful positive change,
Courtney Huntington
Founder
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