JUST DO IT!
By Mirah Riben
My daughter-in-law is doing fabulously as a new mom, totally breastfeeding a bouncing 18 pound five month old! Like all of us, she's met her share of women who lament, "Oh, I tried to nurse, but I couldn't." We smile at them politely, even sympathetically, but compassionately, wishing that they'd had more supportive family or physicians. But my daughter-in-law hit the nail on the head. She believes the reason they fail, is because they enter into it by saying: "I'm going to TRY to nurse my baby."
How many smokers do you know who have TRIED to quit and failed? I know three people close to me I can think of immediately. Each is over 50 years of age and has TRIED more than once to quit. with all the aids available today: gum, hypnosis, patches.
Life is not a game that we ATTEMPT! If you're gonna do something you gotta DO IT, not try! It's a mind set, an attitude of assurance and confidence.
Not smoking, breastfeeding, giving birth (under normal circumstances) are all normal, natural occurrences. The majority of the population does NOT smoke, and many of my generation, like me, used to and quit. I quit smoking over 30 years ago. Cold turkey. I didn't have aids and I didn't TRY to quit. I just quit! So what's so hard?
All the aids and hype to help us do what comes naturally, sends a message of how difficult these simple, natural things are to accomplish. It's Madison Avenue hype once again pounding at our subconscious that we need to buy miracle cures --products to make us slim, to eliminate the "signs of aging." Products to enhance our sex life. Products to make every body part smell just right. And of course tons of products, machines and programs we have to buy to loose weight.
What these ads do -- intentionally -- is undermine our self-confidence. We're not good enough as we are, and not capable of changing what needs tuning up. We need all kinds of help and assistance. That's the message! We are all inferior beings: not pumped up enough, our breasts not big and firm enough, our erections not long-lasting enough. Just a nation of flabby, overweight inferior beings. No wonder we lack the self-confidence to DO anything! So instead we TRY and fail especially simple things like breastfeeding our infants because there are few aids we can buy to help with that task and how can we, heaven forbid, simply trust our own bodies to work properly, when we have been brainwashed to believing how flawed we and our bodies are?
Even among the more "enlightened" of us we see this same attitude. Vitamins, herbs and even hormones are popped like magic elixirs because we are convinced that our bodies do not function properly on their own and we, of course, cannot possibly simply eat properly. We hear it every day: teas to aid digestion, aromatic oils to calm us. Always something we can buy; always something other than US that hold the secret to our happiness and serenity.
And if you want to look within for solutions, you can't simply mediate alone on your inner thoughts, you need a therapist or a meditation guru. Again, the message is that we are not enough on our own -- we need something external to fix us.
And our kids! Oh my! They are supposed to be tiny adults, perfectly behaved in the classroom or else medicated into submission! They must be adept in all sports (or specialize in one very early on like Tiger Woods), music, and the like.
American spend 3-4 times as many hours shopping as Western Europeans, consuming more than $5 trillion worth of goods and services a year--more than double that of the 60s. Four billion shopping centers currently account for approximately sixteen square feet of space for every man, woman and child in this country. American women spend a million dollars an hour on cosmetics and the average woman has 30-35 pair of shoes.
We have become "masters at seeking external solutions to internal sources of emptiness and distress" according to Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want. We have become a nation hooked on seeking one quick fix after another. TRYING everything but seldom DOING anything.
