Success

 

Success Is Gauged by Self-Mastery

That's quite an assertion, but for N. Eldon Tanner in 1975 it was the message he felt he most needed to share. Tanner was a successful politician in Canada, including being Speaker of the Assembly, and was a member of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while still a junior apostle, which makes him seem pretty credible; but was he right? As contrary as it seems to my initial views, after careful consideration I have to conclude that I believe he was. Here's why.

While I have never been obese, I have always struggled with my weight. It goes up and down seemingly independent of anything I do. However, 10 years ago, just after my first child was born my husband and I started focusing on eating healthier food and being more active so that we could set a good example for our daughter. I started tracking everything I ate, how much water I drank, my exercise, and my weight every day in an app.

As soon as I started tracking things I paid a lot more attention to what I did. In order to track the correct amounts of food we used our food scale to make sure we had proper portions (that was an eye-opener) and I thought about what a pain it would be to log one cracker instead of absent-mindedly snacking. I ate ice cream every day, but if I hadn't been active enough to have the calorie deficit to make up for it I jogged on my mini-trampoline for a bit, first. The pounds came off slowly and steadily so I was always making progress, which kept me super motivated. After about nine months I reached the optimum healthy weight for someone my height and I kept it off. Until...

Until I got pregnant again and didn't have the energy to keep up with everything I'd been doing. Still, I gained a healthy amount of weight and after my son was born it started coming down at an appropriate rate. Until...

Until my son passed away. You see, he was born with multiple complex congenital heart defects and spent his first month at Seattle Children's Hospital where he had open-heart surgery at just one week old. He was doing very well, gaining weight, and making all the doctors and nurses (and his family, of course) smile and do happy dances about his progress. But when we went back to the hospital to get ready for his next surgery the catheter procedure he underwent stirred up the RSV that was in his system but hadn't yet presented symptoms and he ended up needing to be intubated, then put on ECMO (a heart/lung machine), and eventually developed bacterial meningitis and went septic, putting too much pressure on his brain. Just over a week after we'd gone to the hospital for a quick procedure and overnight observation we had no choice but to take him off of life support and he passed away in my arms. 

Well, I didn't know I was going to share that story when I started typing, but there it is. And, being as it is pretty much the pivotal moment of my life I'll likely talk about again and again. The reason I bring it up now is that after Samuel died and I grieved for a few months that I can barely remember now, I decided I should restart my healthy habits. After all, I still had a daughter to take care of and teach, and when you see your child go through so much to take care of his malformed heart, you can't help but feel that you are obliged to take care of your perfectly healthy one. 

The thing is, this time although I did everything as I had before and was confident I would succeed in getting back down to my optimum weight, I just kept gaining. I exercised every day, ate healthy food in proper portions, and tracked it all, but my body just didn't respond as it had before. Soon, I was pregnant once again eased off my goals but continued eating healthy food, especially when we learned that this son had an unrelated complex congenital heart defect as well. After he was born my body didn't seem to understand that it wasn't still pregnant and I packed on even more weight as well as having other signs that my body was a bit off. One more baby kind of reset my body and hormones, but by now it had been so long since I'd had any success with my health that it was really hard to stick with anything. 

Here I am now, seven months into a global pandemic where I hardly ever leave the house and I am currently just under my highest weight ever. I've tried many times to restart my healthy habits which worked for me 10 years ago, but when I don't see the results which came so quickly - albeit slowly and steadily - I get discouraged and give up. I've been trying to find ways to motivate myself, but without success, it's hard to do. So...

So, what made me see the wisdom in Elder Tanner's claim that success is gauged by self-mastery, is that my goal shouldn't be the number on the scale, but the actions I take. Sometimes my actions will cause the results I want, and sometimes they don't. I can't control all consequences, but I can control my actions. I know that I want to be healthy and set a good standard for my children, so I can eat and prepare healthy food and limit treats (which is difficult when you bake cakes semi-professionally, but I can do it), I can exercise each day and be more active throughout the day, I can drink plenty of water, get a good night's sleep, and take time to read the scriptures, meditate, and develop myself and my hobbies. Those are things I can do, and no matter what comes from those actions I will be better off, even if the results don't exactly match my hopes or expectations. And with Samuel's eighth birthday coming up next week, this sounds like the perfect time to start.

Pandemics shut down economies, health problems arise, unforeseen circumstances pop up all the time. Sometimes we fail through no fault of our own, but as long as we are doing the right things we succeed. Self-mastery is choosing our own destiny and taking the steps that can lead us there, rather than just being a passenger in our own lives. It's not being a victim but owning our mistakes and accepting that sometimes things happen but they can't stop us. 

Self-mastery is success.