Tag Archives: habits

Kick A Stick

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When you are enjoying a walk, maybe on a forest path, and a log or limb or branch is in your way, you step or jump over it, or maybe walk or run around it & if it’s only a stick, you might just kick it aside as you pass by. I’ve had such clear images lately of myself and my path, and the sticks and branches, limbs and logs, that have been in my way specifically over the last couple years but perhaps really for all of my adult life, and I’ve seen myself smoothly and seamlessly navigating my path forward. Sometimes when I was very strong, or much younger, or simply exceptionally determined for a particular point in time, I could hurdle with ease over the biggest hazards, and my pace never slowed, but I have felt, if I’m being honest, (AND there is no point in NOT being honest, in a blog no less,) much weaker and far less determined these last months, and feeling a bit like trees and obstacles are just piling up in front of me and I don’t like that feeling, of feeling trapped, and the more I think about it the worse I feel. AND I definitely don’t like that!

This morning at yoga our teacher was guiding us in a meditation before we began to move; “may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe, and may I be free from suffering” it sounds much lovelier in sanskrit, and when it is sung, but for me this morning on my mat it was just the words going in and out of my brain when I had one of those stop in my tracks moments. Suffering at this moment is simply self inflicted negative thoughts. Suffering at this moment for me is just sticks, branches, limbs, and logs that I have to kick or skip over because there is nothing “bad” or “wrong” or worth suffering over, for real, in my life at this time, but MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THINGS, NOT THE THINGS THEMSELVES ARE THE CAUSE OF SUFFERING. Yogi Kevin might read this and think, “well duh?!” but for me in a split second I felt 100 times better than I had been feeling for months. It’s very easy to get in a rut of negative self talk and negative thinking and that heaviness I had been feeling for a while just “poof” disappeared. I know it may not last, but then again, maybe it will.

I know people who have had far more difficult experiences in life than I have. I know people who have had true suffering, whose paths have been rocky with sickness, divorce, death, financial ruin, physical and mental health challenges, abuse, addiction, fraud, failure, and losses and pains of all kinds…real ones, not *checks her notes* made up in your own head kind of pains. I feel like even the strongest of us will stumble and trip and get jammed up on our paths when there is perpetual suffering but for somebody like me, for the most part, the suffering is not real, it’s all in my head. It’s like imaginary trees and logs and branches on an otherwise smooth journey. It got me thinking all day today ABOUT WHY I SOMETIMES DWELL ON THE STUMBLES AND STICKS and not just gaze delightedly and gratefully at the clear path ahead. I mean seriously, how lucky??!!

That expression, ‘for the most part,’ is funny but effective because it’s true if nothing else. My life is pretty great for the most part. Period. That can end the sentence and the expression. Why am I, for quite some time now, too long, WAY too long, still thinking about the rough roads when, for the most part, my travels have been rather clear?? I suppose a person far more educated than I would suggest it is a form of self sabotage and she, or maybe he, would probably be right. BUT WHY? Why do it? Why hurt your own self with your own brain and the words you let in it?

I have no answers today & I guess as per usual I am just thinking out loud, through my fingers, on my keyboard. My conclusion, if it were, is that the obstacles, the sticks in my path, the sufferings, are, for the most part, all in my mind. Not figuratively as an expression, literally all in my mind. My thoughts about things are more troublesome than the things themselves. Period. “Kick a Stick” is what I have been thinking all morning. If like me your mind is getting jammed up with obstacles and barriers and negative-Nelly kinds of thoughts, just kick a stick! AND like yogi Kevin sometimes sings to us “Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu” which means may all beings be happy and free from suffering. I wonder how to say “kick a stick” in sanskrit?

Head Games

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I started a new game on Monday.  It’s called, “take better care of yourself because you are almost 50 and you want to have a fun second half of your life” well, it’s  actually called Whole30, but my name for it is what I’m keeping as the mantra in the back of my mind.  I have read a lot on the internet to learn that, to some this eating “plan” is an addiction, or better I should write, a habit, and to others it’s  just another ‘something’ to try in the billion dollar weight loss industry.  It got me thinking last night about what it means to be clean.  I LOVE to clean, really, and I don’t only do it as a job, I do it for pleasure.  I feel so much happiness when I clean and I was thinking about how eating clean ought to bring me just as much happiness and frankly, far more.  My house is so important to me, it’s the best place I’ve ever lived and I love it, for real, but I got to thinking, shouldn’t my body be my most favorite house?  It has to house me til I die…treating it with as much love as I do this stick-built dream with the shiny metal roof and black walnut floors should be a given, but guess what?  for years I treated it like it didn’t really matter to me, and even if I don’t “do” as well on this eating plan, a.k.a. diet, as I hope to, it has, as things so often do in life, shifted my perspective.

Do you remember those commercials with the cast iron skillet, “this is your brain on drugs?”  Well I have read, both in biology classes in college and in countless studies and articles in my adult life, that sugar does to your brain what drugs do.  Really.  Yet, it was not (see how I use “was” rather than “is” here) unusual for me to add a Milky-Way Midnight to my basket almost every time I went to Walgreens for shampoo, or a Twix when I was in line at Home Deopt.  Mindless junk food eating is a bad habit. I was thinking last night that for a food addict or a sugar junky, the aisles filled with point of purchase candy is just as bad for our brains as if drug addicts had to see little bags of heroin or foggy glass crack pipes all lined up in rows each time they bought a magazine at CVS!!  Your brain, when it craves something, really wants it!   EVEN when your brain knows that it is not good for you.  Since Sunday at bedtime, no junk food, sugar, empty carbs, dairy, nor alcohol.  Coffee LOVER that I am, I even started drinking my coffee black, gave up half & half too, just by setting my mind to it.

The success or failure of any goal is all in the games that you play with your own head.  When my friend asked me to start this Whole30 eating program with her, I said “yes” without even a hesitation.  I had no knowledge of it, didn’t research it, knew nothing of the restrictions, but yet I said yes with no thought.  I knew, AND felt, I was very much in need of a drastic change in my eating behaviors and my relationship with food, so I agreed.  THEN I became worried, when I got the email from her, the do and don’t lists, the can and can’t lists, SO many restrictions, “what if I fail?” my brain asked me in my first thought…“that’s a lot of changes to make,” my brain said in its second thought, but then the best part of my brain said, “it’s 30 days, you can do anything for 30 days if you set your mind to it.”  Later that week, my mother, who almost always knows exactly the right thing to say to me said, “why don’t you treat it like a college assignment or project?  You always earned A grades and you never wanted to get anything but the A, in any class you took, look at this as a class you are going to get graded on and you will succeed.”  A+ mom advice right there if ever there was some!!!

I got the text book from the library yesterday after work, ‘It Starts With Food‘ which is written by the husband and wife who developed the Whole30 plan based on their own personal experiment with eating better which lead them to feel better.  Seems so simple, but for an occasional dolt like me, with a sweet tooth, and frankly a tooth for vodka and certainly one for wine too, I kept pushing those thoughts aside…when I quit smoking I knew why I was quitting; it was bad for me, would likely lead to a much earlier death than I’d hope, and I hated how my fingers and hair always stunk.  So to pull the sweet, vodka, and wine teeth, I had to think about it in the same way, what those things do to me, and how if I quit them, even for 30 days at first, I might live longer and feel better, I might NOT get the arthritis I am genetically predisposed to suffering, and I might get into the 11 pair of jeans that have not fit since 2006.

After this experience I might go back to the “bad” but somehow thinking about eating better as “clean” is making THIS new way of thinking so much more appealing to me.  Thinking of healthy whole foods as happy food, rather than the kind of food we label as junk is also feeling useful, even just this early in my experiment.  SO yes,  it might be head games I’m playing, but I’m all in, and face it, we all can do anything for 30 days is we set our minds to it.

Coffee is my drug of choice

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One of my habits, if you will, is that most days when I come home from work, regardless of how early or late in the day, I pour what is left of the coffee in the pot from the morning into a mug with some Half-n-Half in it and microwave it for one minute and 21 seconds.  I am one of those people for whom coffee is much more than a hot beverage.  I have been reheating the coffee from the morning’s pot for all of my adult life.  I fell in love with coffee at 18 years old, I was working full-time and also in college and found that afternoon coffee made night-time classes much easier.  I later learned that afternoon coffee, as well as coffee on the drive to class, and in between classes in the cafeteria or social areas of both campuses I attended, made me more alert in class and the drive home much less tiresome.

When I write that it is my drug of choice, it is true. I was after all a teenager in the 80’s and there were lots and lots of drugs, and as an adult for whom the excitement of trying new things is long over, the comfort of a cup of coffee, no matter the time of day, is something of an expected high, an anticipated pleasure that for me is not easy to describe.  A couple of weeks ago I went to vote after work and as I left the town hall to get in my truck I noted that my head was pounding, and so before I went home I went to WaWa, and as I poured slightly less than 16 ounces of coffee into a paper cup, just the aroma and the KNOWING I was about to sip it, made my headache completely go away.  It got me thinking, I wonder if there is a way that junkies could get that high from the anticipation and the knowing, that could keep them from getting dope sick, but some sort of placebo to get them off drugs…I was thinking that my mental joy of drinking coffee when I feel I NEED it, is almost equal to that of the actual joy of drinking it, my body and my brain respond before the real stimulus is presented.  But I digress… this is not a blog about drugs it is about how much I love coffee and the ridiculously excessive amount of it that I consume, which is apparently how my present boyfriend sees it.

Ten years ago I was involved with a brilliant hippie scientist and one winter we got it in our heads that we would start roasting our own beans.  We bought green beans from a few different companies, one of which, I swear to god, was called -coffee is my drug of choice.com-  and we read a lot about how to roast beans.  We googled information and went on coffee roasting forums, we borrowed books from the library, we asked questions, we were really excited to try this, new to us, and as old as time to others, way of preparing coffee.  We experimented with a number of different techniques and after many successes and several failures, “these beans smell like feet!” was in fact a very bad roast, we found that a 12 inch cast iron old skillet and a wooden wok tool worked the best and for almost a year, we did not buy coffee that was not green and in the form of an itty bitty bean and delivered to the door by UPS.  We developed noses and mouths much like a sommelier, we began to be able to taste and smell the difference between a Costa Rican peaberry and an Ethiopian harrar, and it was a process and an act that stimulated all the senses…listening for the first pop, seeing the beans double in size, turning and turning and turning the beans so they did not burn, smelling the grassiness as the second pop occurs and the oils start to come to the surface of the bean, and then of course, after a full day of aerating, and a burr mill grinding, the first taste…ah…

Yesterday after work as I started my -microwaving the mug ritual- my boyfriend asked me, “why do you drink so much coffee?” and it was not accusatory in tone or condescending, it was quite matter-of-fact, I think he simply wondered what it was about coffee that I drink it so often, but I think I must have looked at him like he had three heads and tentacles for arms because his next question was, with wide eyes and sort of backing up from me, “what??!!”  …and I realized that it was almost impossible to explain to a person for whom coffee does nothing and means nothing.  In those minutes I was sipping last night while he was in the shower I started thinking about how many relationships, friendships, and acquaintances in my life started with coffee…how many times in college I started up wonderfully interesting and once in a life time conversations with someone because we were sitting at a shared table and I said something like, “good lord the coffee is delicious today,” and how many first dates, and last dates were had with cups of coffee and deep thoughtful talk…I realized that drinking coffee is as much a part of my adult life as just about anything else, and I grew up in a house where neither of my parents drank it, ever…it’s the most constant thing I have done in 29 years…I have started and ended many relationships, had hair every length and every color and cut imaginable, had nice clothes and dirty paint clothes, had retail jobs, a corporate job, my own small business, college classes and taught classes (during that briefly confusing year when my mother convinced me I would make a good teacher) raised a child and now love her children, and lived in 9 different houses, but the one thing that has not ever changed is my love of coffee…and now it is time to go downstairs and refill this mug, this brown stoneware mug, of which I have two, that were a wedding gift given to my parents, that as far as I know, during the time they were possessed by my parents, never once held piping hot, intensely strong, morning coffee.