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When one embarks on a mission like this, one thing looms large in the background. Unmentioned, yet unrelenting.

It's always there, repulsive, but somehow attractive, especially to the perennial optimists like myself.

It is a way of gauging progress, or, in my case, the lack of it. It is both encouraging and bewildering. It seems so neutral a thing. Just a tool. So passive. Almost comical if you think about it. You step on it and it spins up to a number, isn't that delightful! Boing, boing, boing! All kinds of fun! My son loves to jump on and off of it watching the numbers spin all the way up to 37 pounds, WEEEEEE! --- which is about as high as he can count right now.

But really, it's not the way it looks, almost like a caricature of a friendly little creature -- Poké Mon-esque, really -- certainly not something all that intimidating. But somehow, as the years pass, it gets creepier, and creepier, until just even partially shifting you weight over to it becomes a frightening exercise in psychological control. Those aren't just numbers anymore. They are a symbol of success or failure. They are cold, calculating, judgmental, and unforgiving. Personally, I try to keep mine covered with a towel while I'm visiting the room where it stays.

With most things higher numbers are better. Like test scores, pay checks, IQ levels, scrabble tallies, IRA percents, and ratings. Here it's more like golfing. The lower the number the better. And since I've never been very good at golfing, the scores I receive on my little device resting on the bathroom floor are consistent with that. Higher and higher each year, until soon, my little 1940s model will not have enough numbers on it. It seems that in the 40s it was rare that a person reached my weight and still lived very long -- I guess that wasn't considered to be a sustainable market.

As with golfing, let's just say these days I'm better off staying in the clubhouse. All the talk about the biochemistry of human metabolism and how food and exercise cooperate to bring our bodies to some form of stasis makes my head spin. There's potassium, selenium, phosphorus, zinc, iron, and all kinds of trace minerals... chromium, etc. We definitely are what we eat. But reading the info about the human body and its function, I am reminded of a class I took in astronomy some years back. It seems, that humans are made of the same stuff as stars. And it also seems, that the ratios of these elements are similar. Iron, Hydrogen, Oxygen... So no matter what amount of force our mass exerts as it interacts with this universe, I think the song "Woodstock" from a long time ago by Joni Mitchell sums the whole thing up rather well -- we are stardust, we are golden.

So with that, the next time we are required to step upon that instrument to measure our "stone" we can find solace in the idea that whatever it has to say to us about our progress or regress, maybe we'll remember that the heaviest part of our bodies can sometimes be our mind.