Column: Notes from Home

It’s spring semester at the college, which means tons of classes, assignments and tests, obviously, and seniors getting ready to launch out from school into the wider world of work or travel or graduate school … or the big move back home to live with Mom and Dad.

Spring also means that a new group of wellness majors need practice working with faculty and staff members who volunteer as clients. I’m not a volunteer every spring semester, but I’ve done it before. It helps the students learn about what it’s like to work with actual people — with all of our uniquely annoying habits — and we volunteers get help with fitness.

I was looking forward to this opportunity. Since last summer I’ve been much more disciplined about regular exercise, running, biking, walking, working out at the Y. I’ve been feeling more fit. As I gazed in the mirror, admiring my profile after showers or while changing, my belly looked flatter; there were even hints of muscle tissue in evidence in my upper chest. My pants fit better. So I was feeling pretty good about myself, almost to the point of thinking it was going to be hard for the student trainer to find something for me to work on.

Then I got her report from the initial screening.

I’d only lost five pounds from where I’d been the year before. My flexibility was pathetic. Although my BMI (body mass index, a number that tells me how much “fat” I carry on my body) was average, my upper body strength put me in the lowest 10 percent of men my age. My diet is not as lean as I had thought — or perhaps been pretending.

That night, my profile in the bathroom revealed an unsightly pot belly and flab. Had that been there all along? Was it my imagination now, or had I been imagining that leaner, fitter body?

How superficial, my critical self chimed in. What does it matter how you look? It’s all vanity, right, just like Qohelet in Ecclesiastes: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”

Of course admiring my profile was superficial. My appearance is about the surface that the world sees; however, that surface can carry an impact that reaches deep into my identity. I say I am a scholar not an athlete, but what that statement reveals is also superficial: it’s how I see myself and my priorities. I will make time to read a book or write something. It’s harder for me to make time for running or working out at the Y. Doing that is not part of my image of myself.

I think that’s a basic truth for all of us. What we display on the surface — especially how we look to ourselves — can mean something deeper.

Here’s another example: Late in my junior year of high school my sister — the wild, uninhibited sibling — persuaded me to start wearing jeans to school. Up to that point I had been a strict Hagar slacks kind of guy, wearing polyester dress slacks (sometimes even leisure suits — the horror, the horror!).

This was a radical change, wearing jeans to school. It was all about how I looked, but that day I felt different, a difference that continued. I felt less uptight, less formal, less distant. Friends, classmates, teachers noticed the change — not all on that first day, but after a week or so. It was as if I had become more human.

Appearance can be a big deal.

However, this is also true: We shouldn’t make appearance mean everything. There is a balance to be maintained between outer and inner selves. We shouldn’t make how we look or how we feel about how we look the most significant marker for us.

Just because I lost some confidence in how “fit” I really was, doesn’t mean that I’m not actually in better shape. Seeing the flab cannot become a reason to give up on maintaining a sound body for this scholar’s mind. Patience and discipline are inner qualities that will play a much bigger role in my real state of health than how I look in a mirror on any given day.

Albert Lea resident David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea. His column appears every other Tuesday.