Uncategorized – Page 40 – in thriver words

Is It Me or Is It Kanye? Practice. Practice. Practice.

I’ve been wondering if Kanye West is mostly delusional or just sometimes oddly effective. Of course, I’m knitting while I ponder this question which makes me further wonder – is it me or is it Kanye or is it everyone for that matter? Are we all a bit unhinged?

The words in the previous paragraph sound as loosely related as a Kanye West rant. See why I’m concerned? Here’s the deal…

I HAVE been knitting. It’s something I haven’t done in 25 years and really only did once before last week. I made a decently well-constructed pair of wool socks in 1980. Now socks may not be the easiest knitting project for a beginner, but at the time I was determined and willing to put in the concentration to keep uniform tension on the yarn and count rows when required. The ribbing at the ankles turned out perfectly.
sock
Through sheer force of will, I completed the socks, gave them as a gift, and vowed never to knit again. I understood that I had no real talent for it and not near enough patience. I was clear that my greatest contribution to the world would not come from a pair of knitting needles. Yet here I am 30 years later amusing my sister by adding rows to the one my mom had cast on a needle and trying to remember what it means to purl.

I can see what a terrible job I’m doing. The weave is too loose. There are dropped stitches here and there and I have no idea what I’m making. But will I stop, rip out the flawed rows, and start over? Oh hell no! I just keep going as though this is something I feel compelled to do – as if it’s a creation that will somehow add required beauty to the world.
knitting
This is where I begin to see a resemblance to Kanye. Why do I keep putting effort and time into something I know isn’t for me? Why not invest that time in an artistic pursuit at which I know I excel? Am I being effective? Does Kanye make an effective argument when he rants that he wants to make the world better and stop bullying by producing clothes? Maybe he’s already made the world a better place through his music.

So, here’s what I’m really wondering: Why do we sometimes promote our own outdated, unrealistic, or Ill-suited goals to the detriment of real, positive contributions we can make to our families, communities and the world? If this were a rarity it wouldn’t be worth noting. In my realm of personal contact, it is not rare. It is rampant. Of course this may indicate I need a new social circle, but I don’t think my experience is aberrational.

I don’t really plan to answer this question. I don’t have the answer. I believe the answer is rooted in our relationship to ourselves, our truth, and our perception of our place in the world. I think it has something to do with our relationship to shame and vulnerability. I think it has a lot to do with our relationship to fear. And I believe these are the same relationships that left neglected, disrupted, or dysfunctional leave us vulnerable to over indulgence in numbing behaviors – over-drinking, over-eating, over-working, over-scheduling, over-spending, binge watching, and drug dependence.

The question is complex, the answers myriad. But maybe the solution is simple! Practice. Practice. Practice.

Practice stillness. See what comes up.
Practice gratitude. It’s the quickest path to seeing a silver lining.
Practice self-compassion. This is where all real compassion begins.
Practice fearlessness. Sit with your fear as long as you can. Leave it. Come back to it. Eventually, that particular fear will be gone.
Practice truth telling. Allow yourself to see what is. Not what you want it to be.
Practice joy. Experience what makes you feel full, free, warm, and content. Choose those experiences.
Practice problem prevention. Make deliberate choices. Own the choices you make and the reasons you made them.
Practice forgiveness. Forgive yourself for your flaws, poor choices, harmful behaviors.
Practice health. Feed your body nutrients. Move, move, move. Lift. Breathe.
Practice curiosity. This is the path to unlimited possibility.
Practice healing. Learn to release yourself from your emotional habits.

Now, back to my knitting. It’s a great opportunity to practice truth telling, self-compassion, and problem prevention. The truth is, my knitting quality is poor. I don’t need to push myself to do a better job at it or try to convince anyone it’s going to turn out better than they think. I can prevent myself from feeling inadequate by giving up this activity that I recognize is not my forte – an act which is itself a practice in healing because feeling like a disappointment is one of my emotional habits.

Wow, now I feel grateful for this knitting experience! Look what a great opportunity for reflection it provided. And that, Kanye, is how you make peace with what is. You’re welcome.

Maybe the Big Picture is Really Smaller Than You Think

When it comes to living a fulfilling, healthy life, maybe the big picture is really smaller than you think. I’ve spent a week surrounded by irony. My sister and I are cleaning out my mom’s house. It’s a four room farmhouse that over the years grew to 3500 square feet. Located seven miles south of the nearest town and 10 minutes from the first national river, the setting is lush, green, pastoral.
porch
Mom was obsessed with her health. Well, not so much health as her “something must be wrong”. It’s a well catalogued journey. The house is filled with handwritten lists, typed medical history, actual medical records, lab reports, and book after book after book on health, healing, diet, meditation, spiritual healing, and alternative medicine.

It is also filled with spiders, trash, mouse poison dumped in odd places, and dust. The furnace filters clearly haven’t been changed recently. The kitchen counters were so dirty when we arrived that we had to scrub them before we’d even sort dusty dishes on them. The irony? One of Mom’s primary health obsessions was allergies. She wore a dust mask if she went outside and sometimes inside. Well, okay clearly she needed it inside this house.
trash
Another favorite focus was food allergies. In the past two days, I’ve read three allergy reports in which she had skin tests for food allergies. According to an email she wrote, she tested allergic to all but 14 foods. In the lab results I read, there was only one allergy common to all 3 reports – brewer’s yeast, and only 3 foods overall above the moderate range of sensitivity. This wasn’t all that surprising. One of our favorite family stories is the time she told a waiter not to bring her coffee with dessert because she couldn’t have caffeine and then asked him to please bring her a coke. Not only did he look confused, he actually asked her which way it was. Was she allergic to caffeine or not?

For all the time, energy, and attention devoted to identifying foods she could have in order to protect her health, she ate little nutrition at all. We used to laughingly say she lived on Dr. Pepper, saltine crackers, and the occasional piece of cherry pie for 20 years.

That is how I remember it, but I’ve always doubted whether that memory was accurate. Then I found a health history Mom had written. In it she says she drank 12 to 14 twelve ounce Dr. Peppers per day. I read it three times to make sure. 12 to 14. That’s 1800 – 2100 calories per day of nothing but soda. My mom was 5’7″ and never weighed over 125 lbs. It sounds like I wasn’t that far off. She was mostly living on Dr. Pepper.

After days and days of following her health saga in bits and pieces as I sort trash, recycle, shred, donate, sell; trash, recycle, shred, donate, sell; trash, recycle, shred, donate, sell, a clear pattern has emerged. If only Mom had taken small steps each day to change her environment, perhaps she would achieved the overall health or healing she was seeking. Instead, she created an environment that isn’t healthy for anyone. Each decision she made contributed to exactly the health crisis she feared.

If she had chosen not to buy over 300 books (we’ve boxed 310 so far) on allergies, alternative cures, cancer prevention, and spiritual healing, she would have had room on the book shelves for books that stimulated her passion or imagination. Or better yet, she’d have had less books to collect dust the dust that irritated her allergies.

If she had chosen to sit on the porch swing every morning and watch the bluebirds, cardinals, swallows, and woodpeckers I saw this morning while drinking a cup of coffee, maybe she would have felt a greater sense of wonder at the beauty in her front yard.

If she had chosen to ride horses with my dad and me, she could have felt the freedom of a rush of wind when the horse hits a gallop.

If she had tried the vegetables from my grandmother’s garden next to our house, perhaps she would have feared eating them less.

Or perhaps she just would have decided she didn’t like them any more. Last year when the blackberry bushes began to produce loads of delicious blackberries, she decided she wasn’t too fond of them after all.
black berries
I will never understand or be able to explain why my mother made the choices she made, but she has provided me with many reminders that the way to create overall health lies in the small choices I make to improve the quality of my life each day.

I can choose to lift weights because it makes my muscles feel more loose and I like that feeling. I can choose to practice yoga because it helps me recognize my tendency to hold my breath when I feel stressed. I can choose to spend time with people who love to laugh. I can make time to sit on the porch and watch the birds. I can read something interesting every day. I can let go of possessions when I no longer need them. I can say no to buying something new unless it solves a problem. I can spend time playing with my granddog. I can show up to help when I’m needed and stay out of things when I’m not. I can take time to plan my meals so that I eat a variety of fresh food that tastes great. I can make time for those I love. I can sit still. I can get plenty of rest and drink plenty of water. I can practice gratitude and always, always tell myself the truth no matter how ugly it is.

Each of these choices is small and each of them improves the quality of any day. When I choose well, then add the days together, I construct a life that is improved one small choice at a time. Eventually, taking care of the small stuff every day will give me the big picture result I desire. And thus, the big picture turns out to be nothing more than one small choice at a time.

Strategic Patience

formula This morning I ran across the term strategic patience. It wasn’t used in the context of foreign policy with Russia. This strategic patience was used to describe a technique employed by teachers in which students are asked to remove themselves from electronics and quietly observe a math formula, graph, or painting. Sometimes the duration of the assignment was only 1.5 minutes, but that time had a positive learning result.

Quiet observation, stillness, contemplation, and mindfulness are words I hear fairly often. I know a few people who practice yoga and many who claim to pray, but most everyone I know is also running as fast as they can most of the time. It is rare that anyone sits still or savors a moment alone.

I know that’s probably true of the people around you as well. In fact, University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues at U.Va. and Harvard found in a series of 11 studies that participants generally did not enjoy even six to 15 minutes alone in a room with nothing to do but think, ponder, or daydream.

We become so accustomed to filling every moment, we schedule more and more and more and then start to rush to get it all done. And we convince ourselves that everything we’re doing is important whether or not we appreciate the value it adds to our lives. We have an idea that through this overabundance we are living more fully, varms but are we, or would strategic patience serve us better?

That’s a big question to answer in a blog post. It’s the kind of big question people write whole books about. I’m in too much of a hurry to write a book. I just need to get this post finished so I can move on to the rest of my over-scheduled day. As a result, I’ll limit the rest of this space to sharing what I’ve learned the past few years…by being still.

Being still matters. It’s important. No, it’s CRITICAL.

I don’t know why exactly except that without stillness there is no motion. Contrasts in life are the way we make sense of things. We can’t know sweet unless we know sour. We can’t know fast unless we know slow. We can’t know happiness unless we know sadness. We can’t know success unless we know failure.

Until we are able to sit still with ourselves, we cannot know ourselves fully and not knowing ourselves frightens us. It leaves us susceptible to criticism because we’re not really sure if the criticism is deserved. It leaves us unable to apologize sincerely because we’re not really sure how we feel. It causes us to bristle quickly because each time someone doesn’t follow their prescribed role in our necessarily narrow script, we feel threatened. It causes us to posture rather than stand confidently tall. It keeps us divorced from our vulnerability without which we cannot receive love. And we all want to be loved.

Now, how does any of this relate to cooking? It doesn’t, but strategic patience is ingredient number one for thriving.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/to-get-students-to-focus-some-professors-are-asking-them-to-close-their-eyes/2016/04/06/b2b019e8-e6ef-11e5-bc08-3e03a5b41910_story.html

https://news.virginia.edu/content/doing-something-better-doing-nothing-most-people-study-shows

Time to Stock up for the Holidays from Nuts.com!

With Halloween behind us, I’m reminded that it’s already time to stock up for the holidays! When I plan my Thanksgiving and Christmas meals, I automatically make a list of items to order from Nuts.com.
NutsBag
Soon after I begin the meal planning, I make a Christmas gift list. It naturally includes even more items I need from Nuts.com. Before you know it, my order is placed and I’m waiting with happy anticipation for a HUGE box of goodies to arrive!

When I first discovered this company, it was called NutsOnline but it’s been around much longer than the internet. In 1929, it began as a family business called Newark Nut Company. Today, it is still a family business with great quality products, packaging, and service.

If you follow a gluten-free diet, there’s a menu link just for you. It leads to a section for Cooking & Baking, as well as for Snacks, Chocolates & Sweets, Nuts, and Dried Fruit.

Within the Cooking & Baking Section, you can choose from more than 30 flours including: Almond, Organic Coconut, Tapioca, Organic Rice, Sweet White Rice, White Sorghum, Chickpea, Chestnut, Millet, Cashew, Hazelnut, Peanut, Pistachio, Pumpkin Seed, Green Pea, Chia, and Black Bean. Also in this section, you’ll find a variety of salad toppings, candy wafers, dried fruit, and fillings.

The Gluten-Free Snack section offers Fried Green Peas, Veggie Chips, Parmesan Garlic Half Popped Popcorn, and Dry Roasted Edamame. You can also find Kale Chips, Trail Mix and unusual granola like Cherry Chia Kale Granola! I’ve never tried the granolas. Perhaps I’ll include one of them in my next order.

Certain to be in my order are Raw Almonds, Raw Cashews, Dried Cantaloupe, Dried Bing Cherries, Halawi Dates, Turkish Figs, Costa Rican Coffee, and some Astronaut Ice Cream Sandwiches.

If you avoid sugar, visit the Sugar-Free link to peruse Chocolate Covered Nuts, Yogurt Raisins, Root Beer Barrels, Gummy Worms, Old Fashioned Fudge, Creamsicle Chews, Mints, Popcorn, and more.

For the hard-to-buy-for person, there are intriguing gift options like Freeze Dried Cheddar Cheese, Sea Salt & Vinegar Broccoli Bites, Sour Tennis Gumballs, White Chocolate Peppermint Fudge, Chocolate Mint Cookie Bites, Gummy Ducks, Key Lime Almonds, and plenty of tins, baskets, and boxes.

It’s such a pleasure to find a reliable supplier of quality products! I love ordering from this website. You might say, I’m a nut for Nuts.com!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

https://nuts.com/