Pygmalion and patience

So while there's no dramatically huge difference between this week's photos and the ones 2 weeks ago, there are noticeable subtle differences.  My back is one of them and my triceps are coming in.  Finally.  Several major realizations were had right about the time these photos were taken:

1.  Alcohol has a lot of calories.  Drinking calories does not make them less than eating them. Go figure. 

(I discovered this 2 days before this picture was taken.  I've been weening myself off drinking - only 2 drinks a day!!  Writing this now over a week later, let me tell you, there are already massive differences.  These next set of pictures should be fun.  And now, i'm a SUPER cheap date.)

2.  In order for me to continue to be making progress within my insanely busy life, I need to be creative with how/when I work out and how/when I eat.  We already knew this, but it keeps getting reinforced.

3.  In order to start cutting, which is the next step in my sculpting process, I need to concentrate on form not the amount of weights I can lift.  This requires PATIENCE in my practice.

Patience is a funny thing.
I'm not so good with it.  According to my mother, I never have been.  Ever.
Not my forte and not my virtue.  Yet, so many things recently in my life from my personal relationships to my art practice have not only required this trait of traits, but demanded it.  My normal way of, "I want it and I want it now" doesn't always work and this has been a hard pill to swallow.
I was trying to think of it as a meditation.  Patience is very much a meditative state.  Yet, I think I have so much clutter in my life at the moment that achieving that status was increasingly difficult.  How was I to get there?  I not only have to live patience right now, I have to physically embody it, move with patience in my very muscles and actions.  But how?

I've been toying with Tarot cards recently and I continue to draw a card that concerns the notion of "surrender."  Surrender to what? I kept asking.  What was it talking about?  Yesterday, while doing the hamstring curls (which I utterly despise doing) slowly, painfully slowly, it hit me like a bolt of lightening. Surrender has to do with patience.
Follow me on this for a moment.

You know that feeling when you want something to go a certain way, or you are not sure how something is going to turn out and you want it to be over already; that weird knot-in-your-stomach-anxiety-twitchy feeling of impatience where you would rather scream and run out of your skin than deal with that uncomfortable uncertainty any longer?  Yep.  I surrendered to it.  I completely let go.  It was weird and uncomfortable for a second too as I didn't believe myself, but low and behold, the twitchy-anxiety melted away.  Patience.  It seems as though you have to surrender into the weirdness and then patience comes from the stillness maintained afterwards.

So then how does Pygmalion come into this?  Well, we all know the story right?  A sculptor creates a perfect woman out of ivory and despite his general "I'm so over women" feelings, falls madly in love with his own creation.  But it's a sculpture and he's human, so obviously there's some issues there, but he believes in his love as a pure love.  Being a devout Venus worshipper, She decides to treat him kindly and makes the ivory sculpture come to life.  There's slightly more to it, but that's a good summary of Ovid I would say.  I came up with this weird idea of being both Pygmalion and the sculpture all in one. That hints at heavily what I was writing about last time, but it also encapsulates a bit more.

Pygmalion is a devout man.  His attention to detail, his worship of divinity.   All of these things take a strange kind of patience, an understanding of some kind of an end however abstract and undefined, and the cohones to diligently plod along working away towards their potential completion.  I am now at the detailed bits of my sculpture.  The 000 brush parts of a painting (painters you know what I'm saying here) that is both the most painful and the most fun.  The slow, steady, lifting up and slowly painfully letting down of each movement with the weights is like a tiny chisel exacting the fine points of the sculpture.  I do these motions with a devout repetitiveness that if I didn't have faith in the process, I wouldn't be able to do it.

Perhaps then, Venus will make my sculpture come to life as well.  I guess then with patience and a faith in the process, my virtue will be my reward?