It Feels Like Only Yesterday …

A young couple move into a house … their ‘dream home’, as they like to think of it. They’re very happy there, and they keep it nice and tidy. They’re proud of it. The house is filled with light and laughter. Life is wonderful.

Time passes (as it always does) … and they’re very busy. Life is quite hectic and there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to keep the place the way they want it. So they don’t take quite as much care of the house as they used to, but they still manage to keep it quite nice. There’s not quite so much laughter now though, and not quite so much light. But things are good.

Time passes (as it always does, even when everything’s going really well) … and they encounter some troubles along the way. He loses his job, she has an accident. They find themselves arguing about little things, things that don’t really matter. Money’s tight, and that adds to their discomfort. It’s hard to keep laughing when things go wrong. The house isn’t looking so dreamy now. Things get left lying around and things go unwashed. Things accumulate too (and they can’t really work out why, they just seem to accumulate) … and the place just isn’t the place they remember.

Time passes … inexorably

Time passes (as it always does, even when times are hard). They’re older now, and illness is a regular visitor. And the house is a bit of a mess. They don’t even bother washing the dishes after a meal sometimes and they even reuse plates that have been lying round unwashed. They don’t put the garbage out regularly and it adds to the musty smell in the house … and the house is beginning to smell now … their dream is fast becoming a nightmare. But it’s not so bad … in fact, they hardly notice it.

Time passes (as it always does, even when you don’t realise it’s passing, and sometimes that make it seem to pass so much quicker) … and they’re not fixing broken things anymore. They’re not even making any attempt to make-do-and-mend, and often just throw things away (but more often just stash them where they think no-one will notice … but the house is getting cluttered … and they can’t help but notice it now).

And the windows aren’t opened very often anymore, and sometimes not even the curtains, which makes the house smellier and darker … and a perfect breeding ground for microbes and small creeping things. The nightmare is going from bad to worse. And the horror of it is that they don’t even realise it, most of the time.

This is YOU!

Listen to me … this is YOU, if you let things go. If you stop paying attention to the important things. If you let things get messy and slipshod. If you stop getting enough fresh air and sunlight. If you stop noticing and recognising all the miracles that surround you. If you let accidents and illnesses divert you from the path you’ve chosen, the path of health and fitness and happiness.

So you let yourself get out of shape (but ever so gradually). You get messy. You get careless. In terms of diet and elimination, you ‘leave things lying around’ that cause illness and discomfort. You get fat. You get lazy. You get unmotivated. You can’t even remember what it was like to have a waistline, never mind a six-pack. You get depressed. You get used to feeling useless. Being miserable feels normal. You lose hope. You lose direction. You lose the will to live.

This … is what waits for you in your future if you don’t build solid habits and stick to them like your life depends on it (which it does, of course). This is what waits quietly and menacingly just round the corner if you are careless and let yourself go. This is what getting out of shape feels like.

Don’t worry, you won’t even know about it!

But don’t worry, you won’t even know it’s happening. You probably won’t notice it at all. It happens stealthily, when you’re not paying any attention. It happens in tiny, microscopic increments that are invisible and unnoticeable. But it happens just the same. And it keeps happening. Because time passes … as it always has and always will … and things that are happening by tiny amounts just keep happening and just keep building up till they’re overpowering and unbearable.

This is what letting yourself go feels like. This is the feeling that’s left when you’ve let opportunities pass you by. And it will feel like it’s happened in the blink of an eye, because although time passes, as it always has and always will, it always feels like it was only yesterday that you were young and fit and strong, and the whole world was bright and shiny and pregnant with potential and possibilities.

Yeah … it feels like only yesterday …