Friends of the Family

Get your soul in shape with a spiritual workout

Are you reading this while working out on your NordicTrack? While racking up aerobic points on your exercise bike? If so, you are probably following through with a resolution you made on Jan. 1 to get in shape for the new year.

Around 10 p.m. Christmas night, I looked out our kitchen window to see a teen-age neighbor shooting buckets. He was running and weaving down his driveway taking shot after shot. This was not unusual. He consistently works to improve his speed and perfect his free throw. What was exceptional, however, was the 15-degree temperature.

Working out that evening meant facing the cold head-on and going ahead anyway. All workouts involve overcoming resistance of some kind, be it your running shoes slapping the pavement, your legs pushing to keep the exercise bike spinning, or pumping up with weights. You push. Something pushes back. Muscles result.

I think this explains why our young neighbor was the only person outside doing free throws on Christmas night, and why we are not surrounded by physically fit people. It's hard. It's not "what comes naturally."

One of the things I look forward to during my vacation is suspending my admittedly low-key daily workout. I just want to eat, sleep and drift without having to achieve something. No interruptions, please. And no resistance.

This leads to the central question: Is life meant to be primarily workout or vacation? The media and advertising revolve around the assumption that life should be one, long vacation. And we're all entitled to it. "You deserve a break today" and tomorrow and everyday along with a luxury vehicle with top performance handling and a suburban megahouse. Add no layoffs, no serious illness for your family, and a world full of people who agree with whatever you think.

One problem -- most of us do not feel like we're on vacation most of the time. This applies especially to moms and dads who are coping with the constant unpredictability of caring for young children, whose temperatures spike a half hour after the clinic closes, and whose science projects tumble off the dining room table the night before they're due.

The life of a parent is coping with one thing after another. "It just goes to show you, it's always something" was a line the late Gilda Radner immortalized. And it always will be.

Life is definitely a workout. But challenges and even stress are not necessarily bad for us, provided they are not excessive and long term. It's primarily our attitude toward life's workout that determines whether normal difficulties will promote well-being or disease.

An article in the Dec. 17, 2001, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that "Harvard researchers found that men in their 60s were less likely to develop coronary heart disease, if they had optimistic outlooks on life ... the ones who developed heart disease were largely the ones described by standardized personality tests as pessimistic."

The article pointed out that past studies have evaluated how negative emotions, "such as depression, anxiety, and hopelessness, contribute to the physical decline of a person who is already sick." What is new here is the growing research showing that a positive mental attitude can help maintain good health or be a protection against some disease.

A positive mental attitude does not come naturally to many people. Griping and complaining will always be popular pastimes. Often it takes a conscious effort to develop a positive attitude. Why? Because life is a conveyor belt of various difficulties and problems to be solved.

We don't have control over all the problems that come our way, but we can and do choose our attitude toward those problems. I can believe that I am entitled to a hassle-free life and then be depressed and angry that life refuses to conform to the vacation scenario I have planned. Or I can see the challenges as opportunities for me to continue my workout and increase my overall emotional and spiritual health.

During this past year, one of my work colleagues became a father for the first time. As any parent can tell you, infants can interfere with one of the staples of a good vacation, e.g. rest. I asked him how he was coping with having his sleep interrupted. He replied that he expected it. He was trying to make the most of being awake after midnight. He felt that the benefit of having a new life in the home was worth it.

He did not say that he was enjoying the feeling of sleep deprivation, but rather that caring for a small child was bringing about in him something deeper and more profound than personal comfort.

Popular culture tells us that the universe has been designed for our personal gratification. If I'm not comfortable, the universe owes me. A spiritual perspective tells us that we are here to get our souls in shape. And that's a workout.

(Pankratz is a marriage and family therapist in Catholic Charities Milwaukee regional office.)