There comes a time in your life when it hits you. Usually, it’s when your pants are getting tight and you think, the easiest thing is to buy bigger pants.
Perhaps you go to Target and they don’t have any pants in your size, or they do, but in the “Big&Tall” section. Embarrassing, right? And maybe you have stopped looking in the full-length mirror because it’s too hard to see what you’ve become? Or maybe you end up at the doctor’s office and your cholesterol is all out of whack and you are pre-diabetic and the doctor has to have “the talk” with you?
And you say, “okay, I’m not taking care of myself. I need to change some things.”
Thing is, no one wants to do this, right? No one wants to get off the couch and lift weights or eat a salad instead of four slices of pizza. Pizza is delicious! Weights are heavy!
But, you look toward your own future and you can see where this trajectory is taking your life. You need to get serious about things. Or you’re going to end up chronically ill and so huge that you’ll never leave the house. And the next time your friends see you, it’s either at your funeral or on an episode of My 600-Pound Hoarder Life.
And you know you can’t just give up one thing. You need to give up a lot. So you can live. So you can have some kind of future. You can’t do this stuff in half measures. The word “strict” belongs in front of your routine because you know you don’t want to slip back into your old habits.
Well, guess what, Nantucket? This is your wake-up call.
It’s time to get serious. The doctors here have all been giving you “the talk” about your water quality, your housing shortages, your traffic, your overcrowding, your declining scallop industry, and your leisure-based lifestyle fed by super caloric and fatty short-term rentals. A lot of you have gotten so incredibly fat (real estate, construction, landscaping).
We know you don’t want to stop building and selling and fertilizing this island. But the thing is, you are literally killing the community. Every bite you take sends another family to the boat packed up with all of their belongings because it’s impossible to make a life here anymore.
This has to change. Why? We are an island. Expansion beyond a certain level is unsustainable.
We can’t just keep buying bigger pants.
