What Kind of Person Are You Becoming by the Care of Your Body?

If you read John Steinbeck's East of Eden as a teenager, you probably remember it as a sprawling family saga. The Salinas Valley. A love triangle gone wrong. Twin brothers who couldn't stand each other.

If you've gone back to it as an adult, especially after raising kids or watching a marriage struggle, it lands completely differently.

There's a scene late in the book where Lee, the family's quiet philosopher, breaks down a single Hebrew word: timshel. It means "thou mayest." Not "thou shalt," which removes your choice. Not "thou shalt not," which does the same thing from the other direction.

Thou mayest. You are free to choose.

Dang.

That one word carries the whole book. The same patterns of rejection, rage, and self-destruction repeat from one generation to the next, and every time, the story insists that repetition is not the same thing as fate. You may choose differently. You may become something other than what came before you.

Some people think it's a flaw when a great author keeps circling the same handful of themes. For Steinbeck, it was good and evil, free will, and whether a person can outrun what they came from.

For others, we understand that only a few questions actually matter, and we're willing to spend a lifetime asking them again in new circumstances.

All forms of art work this way.

Georgia O'Keeffe painted the same New Mexico hills and bleached bones over and over across five decades.

Dolly Parton has spent her whole career writing her way back to the same mountain home, the same coat of many colors, the same hard, tender upbringing, just dressed in a different song each time.

Neither woman was running out of ideas. They were using one fixed subject to measure how far their understanding had traveled. The repeated subject wasn't a limitation. It was the instrument.

I think health works the same way. The tools change. The trends change. The circumstances change. But the deeper questions stay remarkably consistent.

Most people think health is primarily about decisions.

What should I eat? How often should I train? Should I weigh my food? Is the back squat good or bad for me?

Those are reasonable questions. They just aren't the ones that matter most.

The decision itself is simply the circumstance in which character gets revealed and formed.

The first deeper question I'm obsessed with is this:

Two people can have nearly identical habits around nutrition, sleep, and training and come out the other side as completely different people.

One becomes obsessed, impatient, defensive, judgmental, and self-absorbed.

The other becomes courageous, generous, humble, patient, and genuinely useful to the people around her.

You can perform health without being changed by it.

The habits themselves are morally neutral. It's only what comes out of them that we can call good or bad.

Over 17 years of coaching, I've watched this play out again and again. I've worked with people who were disciplined, capable, and aesthetically impressive, and none of that ever guaranteed they were decent to the people in their life.

I can think of two people who both lost a significant amount of weight over roughly the same stretch of time.

One got quieter and steadier. She started noticing when the people around her seemed nervous or unsure of themselves, and made a point to put them at ease. She got more patient with her kids, not less.

The other got harder to be around. She started weighing herself twice a day, snapping at her husband over dinner plans, and never quite able to stop comparing her progress to someone else's.

Same program. Similar amount of weight lost. Wildly different outcomes.

One became more useful. One became less useful. That distinction matters more than either number on the scale.

We tend to imagine our lives changing through the right sequence of decisions. If we can just figure out whether to weigh our food, train three or four days a week, or find the perfect program, everything else will fall into place.

But the decisions themselves are rarely the point.

Whatever you choose becomes an opportunity. An opportunity to become more fearful or more courageous. More self-centered or more humble. More rigid or more adaptable.

The circumstances change. The internal work stays remarkably similar.

Which brings me to the second deeper question:

How do you handle the cumulative cost of change?

Life is going to keep doing what life has always done.

Something breaks. An injury happens. A kid gets sick again. Your spouse doesn't understand what you're carrying. Business hits another tight season.

In health, we tell ourselves, If I could just get back to where I was, everything would be okay.

But there is no going back.

The body doesn't return to one fixed set point. Neither does your life. We regulate. We adapt. We re-stabilize. And then we do it again.

Change is the one thing that never changes.

So the question isn't what happens if you can't train right now, what people will think if you're not as strong as you used to be, or whether you'll ever feel the way you did ten years ago.

The real question is: what is required of me now?

Sometimes the answer is aggressive action. Sometimes it's fixing what's broken. Sometimes it's doing absolutely nothing, which for a lot of us is the hardest choice of all.

The point of asking these deeper questions isn't to feel superior to the person next to you on the rack. It's to stay useful.

It's easy to look useful when life is going according to plan. Since it rarely does, it's far more practical to learn how to ask these questions when it doesn't.

You can fake a lot of things. Usefulness isn't one of them.

Near the end of East of Eden, Adam Trask is dying.

His son Cal has just confessed something terrible, something that mirrors all the worst parts of the family history he was trying to outrun. Cal is convinced he's destined to repeat it, that he's already been written into the same story as everyone who came before him.

With his last bit of strength, Adam manages one word: timshel.

Thou mayest.

Not a guarantee. Not forgiveness handed over with no accountability attached. Just permission to choose something other than what came before.

Most people read that scene as a father's final blessing. I think it's closer to a description of how change actually works.

Not a clean break from your past. Not a guarantee that you'll never repeat old patterns. Just the ongoing, exhausting, worthwhile fact that you get to choose again, today, with whatever you've got.

In health, we do this constantly.

If I could just get back to my college weight. If I could just get back to before the injury. If I could just get back to before I had kids. If I could just get back to who I used to be.

There is no going back. There is only the next version of reality, the next demand, the next adaptation, the next opportunity to answer the same question.

Steinbeck kept writing his way back to timshel his whole career. O'Keeffe kept painting the same hills. Dolly kept singing about the same home.

Health may not be any different.

The circumstances change.

The question remains: what is required of me now?

Earn your results daily,
Laci

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