Little Imperfections

Nobody is born perfect. However, the little imperfections we have can haunt our psychic disturbing our mental peace. A point to note here is that the imperfection may not be causing us loss but the feelings associated with it may be damaging us gravely. Below I discuss three small real-life cases where I witnessed how slight imperfections can hamper a healthy mindset, and how one can fight through it.

Case 1: A friend of mine recently started witnessing receding hairline. Mind you, he is just 23 years old. “Genetic reasons”, he said. His father had a similar issue and so did his grandfather. He feared how he would lose confidence if he lost all hair. He saw his imperfection staring at him.

Case 2: He was born with the mind of a powerful man but with legs of polio. His right leg was half the size of the left one, baring acting as a stick. It resembled as if he was walking with a stick, just that stick had skin on it. He lived through bullying and being thrown around. He had no friends, no confidence, no real purpose. His imperfection was staring right at him.

Case 3: When I was 9 years old, I was diagnosed with Gynecomastia. I had swollen nipples, which at my age appeared breasts developing, which was odd because I was a male. It was caused due to hormonal imbalance. I have lived in shame and guilt of having swollen nipples for a long time. Hiding them behind clothes made my wardrobe options shrink as fast as my confidence. It was my imperfection staring right at me.

Think about it. Does one thing, one imperfection, need to define who you really are? Will one small genetic mistake decide the fate of your vanity? Will one disease alone be enough to poison your entire childhood and threaten all your future?

NO.

Not if you are willing to read on and follow what I am going to write next.

To all the people feeling they aren’t perfect physically, to all those who believe they look hideous, to all those who believe they don’t have confidence, I say this: WORKOUT.

Workout. Period.

You see, when you workout and start improving your fitness, you will initiate this transformation. Now this transformation, be very careful, is three-dimensional. Most people feel that it just works in one direction: make you gain muscle. This is wrong. Read on!

When you constantly workout, stretch the limits of your body, improve your core strength, your body changes. Your muscles grow to the size and shape they should be in, the way natures designed us to be. The fat goes away and your face becomes prominent. Your posture improves and so does the amount of face you choose to lift. Your body becomes better by each passing day. This is the first dimension.

Next is the changes you would feel at a mental level. You witness the physical transformation and you gain confidence. The perception you have for your own self-changes. Here the feeling of achieving something you thought was so difficult also comes into play. You see this as a stepping stone towards greater goals in life. This is the second dimension.

When you lift iron in the gym, you embrace pain. The way our muscles grow is very simple. The muscle does two motions: contraction and expansion. Now when you do any exercise, you engage a particular muscle in these two motions. When you work that muscle out, it tears off a bit. How much this muscle will tear depends on how hard your workout has been on that muscle. In other words, how much you have exhausted that muscle. Next, you fill your system with protein which helps bind that muscle together. Combined with proper rest, the muscle recovers and is bigger in size, stronger in strength. Now for this to happen, you constantly need to tear that muscle, workout after workout.
To explain it better, let’s look at it from another point of view. They say it doesn’t matter if you do 5 reps per set or 20 reps per set, it matters how many reps you do after the muscles start to pain. Muhammad Ali once said he didn’t count his reps before it started paining. Only the reps we do bearing that pain really count in making us stronger and bigger. So in order to grow, we must embrace pain in increasing quantities in every subsequent workout we do.
Now when you take on so much pain in the gym, something changes. It is a spiritual experience that you witness in which it becomes easier for you to push through the pain. It is this exercise of moving against the pain that we do in the gym that provides that spiritual bend in our life. We start seeing things differently.
We understand the pain of others better because we then recognize pain better.
We don’t feel pain in normal life so much because of what we feel inside the gym.
Everything becomes clearer under pain and the moment we start embracing it inside our gym workout, we also start embracing it in our life. This is the third dimension, where how we look at pain and growth changes.

This is the way workouts improve your life. It is hard to find people who undergo such physical transformations and still remain confused, directionless or sad in their lives. The reason is simple: you gain perspective over your limits, pain and get the confidence to start planning for other aspects of life too.

I believe everyone should thus stretch their limits and get to the best physical form they can be in before deciding to give up on their imperfections and before kneeling down in defeat.

Thanks for reading. 🙂