I'll Take One of Those with a Side of Effort

I hate eating oranges.

I'm not saying that I hate oranges. Especially when the millions of tiny liquid balloons in each section are filled to nearly bursting with sweet-enough juice, and you feel your health soar just from getting some of that squirting into your mouth. But they are such a pain to eat that I rarely do. Even my Christmas orange--which should go into my stomach ahead of all the chocolate accompanying it in my stocking, if there is a mother's voice (Mom's or mine) anywhere in my head--sometimes gets overlooked until it rots.

I only have four things against oranges. You have to peel them. The skin is often so tough that a thumbnail gets pulled away from the skin enough to hurt for a couple of days and need to be band-aided back together tightly like a fresh tree grafting. They are surrounded by tough fiber, which, I know, is good for me. But still. And they are messy. I can never eat oranges without completely soaking my hands, and maybe my desk, because--let's face it--a paper towel is no protection from an orange. Often, they have seeds, which is a trial all its own.

Despite all of these very good, very true arguments, three days in a row this past week, I chose to eat an orange before eating anything else that day. (Did you note that, angels? That should make up for the past three Christmases.)

A health problem keeping me from working out in all ways but one (walking) for the past five months has made me lose a lot of ground, fitness-wise. (And made me gain a lot in another way that I really don't want to mention.) The past few weeks as I've worked to reclimb the fitness mountain I have been sliding down, I've made endurance and strength gains, but I haven't made progress in terms of the thing I don't want to mention.

I'm finally at the point where I can face the fact that I need to eat less, and smarter. And that food should be harder to eat than it is. Over the past eight weeks, I've busted my buttons to work up what I can burn off on an elliptical to 450 calories a day--still half of what I used to burn before I popped an artery. Yet, give me a frosted sweet roll, and I can easily down 450 calories in five minutes, with hardly any effort at all!

The easier something is to eat, the more likely we will reach for it. These days, an American can easily fill up every day without ever getting out a mixing bowl or turning on a stove.

A hundred years ago, you might eat a treat, but you would most likely first have to prepare it. Which didn't mean tearing open a box, adding water, and baking. It could have involved measuring out each single ingredient. Maybe even preparing the ingredients separately before adding them. Maybe even growing, grinding, shelling, churning, paring, chopping, hunting, gutting, plucking, picking, or kneading it. I finally realized more fully that nature intended us to burn a few calories before we can shovel any in.

This principle is not at all subtly illustrated by the movie WALL-E, where people spend their whole lives sitting down and shoveling in calories in the easiest way possible--drinking something that is all ready to drink. I know from experience that nothing flows down the throat more easily than a hot chocolate loaded with whipped cream. In this futuristic film, food has been processed to the point that it is completely unrecognizable and not dealt with by human hands, and humans have evolved to a huge water balloon shape and size and barely possess any bones anymore. Sad but true commentary, I find.

So, until we ran out of oranges at home, I peeled back my orange skins, dug through tough membranes with my fingernails to release seeds, soiled my fingers and desk, and chewed my way through more orange sections than I really wanted, to begin my feeding each day. Then stood up, walked to the sink, and washed off my hands, tasting orange juice in my mouth and feeling healthier already.

The Picture Emerges

Recently, I rediscovered counted cross-stitching. My family stared in amazement as I began to bring a picture to life on a plain burlap canvas. It's not their fault they couldn't believe it--I haven't done counted cross-stitching for twenty years, and everything I did in the past, I gave away as presents. It's amazing how twenty years can go by like that.

Anyway, my artistic nine-year-old was most interested. Shyly, he sidled up to my bed as I drew my pattern and asked if I were going to sew right on the paper. I explained that it was just a pattern to follow when I actually sewed onto material.

He didn't get it.

When I did start stitching the words, he was back, interested in every step and encouraging me every fifteen minutes. "That's really starting to come together," he said thirty times over the course of the work.

Because of his curiosity, I showed him how I made the X's, how I always did the upper left to lower right stitch first, then the upper right to lower left stitch over it, to make it look uniform. He could see on his own that using slightly different shades deepened the realism of the flowers and how outlining them made them pop.

He stayed interested over the four weeks it took to complete the picture, asking what color I was doing next, and what color I was going to outline the yellow with. I modified what I'd heard is a carpenter's motto: measure twice, cut once, to count twice, stitch once.

Despite this, he got to watch me unpick my work several times.

"See?" I'd show him. "I was supposed to start this row here. But I got mixed up."

"That's a lot of counting," he commiserated.

As I worked over the hundreds of individual stitches, trying to do each one correctly, I found myself talking to my son about how each stitch is like each action in life. One stitch doesn't seem like much in the big picture, but for the end result to come out right, each needs to be done correctly. If I start doing some of it wrong, I could mess up a whole part of the picture.

I thought about how all the tiny actions of each day--washing the same kitchen counter over and over, folding the same clothes into the same drawers, reaching out a hand to take the sacrament each week, flossing your teeth--all contribute to a life well lived. When small things are taken care of, bigger things fall into place.

I talked to him about that being like repentance: you have to undo what you did wrong and try to do it right from then on. If you don't correct as you go along, bigger parts of your life could turn out wrong, or off, or not the same as they would have.

Then I thought about the pattern being like the scriptures and other gospel teachings. You are supposed to look at it in order to know what to do. If you don't look at it carefully and correctly, you find you're off on the wrong thing or in the wrong way. You could miss the boat, so to speak.

Often, when I am carefully following the pattern, the stitches I am making don't look right to me. Surely doing that curve way up there will make the "e" look funny, and I think I should be making stitches a row lower, or in some way different than the pattern. I just can't see how following the pattern is going to make things turn out right.

But when I'm done, it does look right, and I marvel at how fallible my own unaided eyes are, how silly my finished picture would look if I just used my own judgment and didn't trust the pattern.

That's how I know that doing things the scriptures teach us that seem counter-intuitive--like turning the other cheek, forgiving an enemy, keeping a commandment in a sticky situation--actually result in a better life picture than anything we could have done, simply looking at a blank canvas, on our own, and doing what seems best at the time.