Heeding the wake-up call

I’m finally reading “No Impact Man,” and one of the ways it’s resonating with me is that sense of waking up to the things that are holding us back -- not so much in an environmental kind of way, though that’s obviously a big part of what Colin Beaven intends, but in a positive psychology kind of a way. This trend among some psychologists to shift their focus from the most deficient end of the human hang-ups continuum to that huge glut of us stuck near the midpoint -- able to function in society and even, on the surface, appearing “successful,” yet too bogged down with mental baggage to reach our full potential.

In the book, one of the things Beaven keeps coming back to is what a soul-sucking machine their giant TV (in a small New York apartment) had become.

In my case, it’s the realization that instead of feeding one human body all these years -- which ought to be an easy task in a society where food is abundant -- I’ve been feeding various whiny components of my personality. So I’ve not only been physically bogged down by the extra weight that’s accumulated, but mentally and emotionally distracted by all these interior battles over food. It’s like I’ve got four hungry kids in my kitchen, each with their own desires and agendas, and inside my skull I’ve got another crowd vying for attention.

It’s not a debilitating condition, exactly. We‘ve managed to live frugally in spite of my overeating. It’s not even as much of a social stigma as it used to be, because so many Americans are fat these days. Everybody’s doing it, just like everybody (except us) has a TV. But when you suddenly wake up and realize what’s going on, it’s mind boggling to see how much we Americans can get in our own way. Not just sometimes, but methodically, as if we were programmed to only go so far.

Of course, it’s one thing to see a problem and another thing to solve it. For Beaven and his wife, getting rid of the TV opened up vast vistas of free time, which they filled with more meaningful activities. (And that’s just one small corner of their no-impact experiment.)

For me, it’s been a process of identifying the whiners in my head, and deciding which of them to quit feeding. I’m pretty much down to just two competing interior voices at this point: a primitive presence that panics over hunger, and a childish, spoiled entity that wants to have its own way, damn the consequences. I make sure my inner cavewoman eats first, filling up on low-cal foods that keep her from freaking out, and only then do I appease the inner child with some small treat.

It’s a relationship that’s working out on the scale, which registers a loss of a little over 24 pounds. Naturally it comes with a price: A little less than $90 to Weight Watchers, which acts as my drill sergeant, weight-loss program subcontractor and shrink.

I can feel the interior baggage melting away along with the pounds. I’m still not sure what, other than attempting to run a 5K this summer for the first time in about 30 years, I’m going to do with my emerging “positivity.” But whatever it is, it sure feels like it’s going to be fun.

Gift I’m glad I didn’t get in 2009

A Kindle. For one thing, they still cost way too much, even as a gift from my overly generous parents, and certainly not from Bob or the kids. Besides, even though it would be really awesome to carry around all my favorite books in digitized form, I can’t help wondering if I really need the whole book, or just my favorite passages. I guess it comes down to a question I’ve been asking myself this fall as we try to shed some of our dead-tree tonnage: Why do people keep books they've already read?

When it comes to self-help books -- two that I really connected with this year were Barbara Fredrickson's “Positivity” and James A. Levine's “Move a Little, Lose a Lot” -- I find myself going back for another dose of inspiration, the way many people draw fresh inspiration by re-reading the Bible.

With my favorite novels, I sometimes think that my interest in going back is not so much to re-experience the story as to savor some passage or image that I really connected with -- in many cases, something that could have made a really great poem, but has more resonance because you’re connected to the character in a much deeper way. An example: I often think of that passage in John Irving's "A Widow for One Year" about the kind of intimate gaze that surveys your beauty not just inside a particular moment in time, but all of you, in all the time you've experienced together. Or something like that. I'll have to go back and check one of these days.

I can envision a New Yorker cartoon in which some guy purports to be constructing a do-it-yourself Kindle by scanning passages from his favorite books into his laptop. Less clutter that way. Cheaper, too.

Is that something I'd try myself, if I had the time? I've had nuttier ideas, certainly. But the main reason it won't happen is that even as we prepare to enter the second decade of this century, I remain at heart a 20th century creature who prefers real books over Memorex. We'll see if that's still the case at this time next year.