Friday, 18 December 2015

For Today: Substance over Shadows

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.  -- Aesop.

This morning I reflect on my progress.  The substance of my spiritual fitness is in much better shape than it was.  My spirit is healing.  My weight is up a bit but my VO2 max score has improved, my blood work is good, and my blood pressure is excellent so my body is doing well too.

I noticed yesterday my heart rate elevated considerably in weighing myself at the gym with my trainer.  My weight stresses me out.  But it is a shadow, a by-product, of my spiritual and physical struggles.  The substance of my healing is not a number on the scale.  As the reading says this morning:
A normal sized body is a fringe benefit received in the course of reconstructing that which cannot be seen.
Aesop, a storyteller and slave believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE, was said in ancient times to be more attached to the truth than the poets for he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, adding at the end the advice to do a thing or not do it. 

In the case of this morning's caution not to lose the substance by grasping at shadows, Aesop tells the story of the dog with a piece of meat on her way home to enjoy it.  En route, she passes over a plank traversing a running brook and looks down to see her reflection.  Believing it to be another dog with another piece of meat, she thinks she would like that meat too.  So she snaps at it, losing her own meat to the depths of the water, and is left with none.

Aesop himself was described as a strikingly ugly slave who, by his cleverness, acquired freedom and became an adviser to kings and city-states.  He was said to be of "loathsome aspect ... potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped - a portentous monstrosity."  Poor guy.  His substance definitely outweighed the shadows of his physical form.  It is not surprising, perhaps, that another of Aesop's lessons is "It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds."

Substance over shadows. 

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