Reading Labels Sucks

What Socrates apparently failed to understand was that while perhaps the unexamined life isn't "worth living," it's a whole lot easier and a whole lot tastier.  

I am planning to do a cleanse aka Paleo/Whole30 where I go 3 days with out gluten, dairy, sugar, legumes, or alcohol.   Samm and I have a big double date already pre-bought for August 11th that will no doubt include delicious wine, so... I'm starting the cleanse the next day, obviously.  One only gets to sip wine at local farm dinner parties so often in life.

I may be mildly obsessing over the cleanse. 

 

Partly because I love food, and looking at recipes means thinking about deliciousness. 

 

Partly because, thank God, my daughter went back to taking naps after a harrowing 4 day strike.  So I have time to plan.  Happiness.  

Partly because I rarely plan meals ahead,  so we eat a lot of the same concoctions from our kitchen with my favorite Trader Joes and farmer's market ingredients. And I order a lot of El Burro nachos.  Because they're breathtaking.  So it's high time for me to experiment with shopping lists and looking forward to the amazing fresh menu I'm crafting. I am open to suggestions, by the way.  

So I'm planning recipes, and I'm starting to realize foods I assumed were 100% fabulous for me contain some not so fabulous ingredients.  Reading labels stinks!  But I guess that's great!  It's the whole point.  Chicken sausage from TJs has sugar, WHAT.  And most devastating of all, today it dawned on me that Sriracha is basically full of crap... Well. "Chili, sugar, salt,garlic, distilled vinegar, potassium sorbate, sodium bisulfite and xanthan gum."  [Delicious crap.]

So I may or may not try to make some homemade Sriacha for my cleanse.  Sigh.  

The examined life.  It's exhausting.

Here's why I'm trying to do the cleanse. 

So I know what I'm eating.  

So I can choose what my family is eating. 

So I can see what it feels like to live off sugar/gluten.  Completely.

And THEN I'm hoping I will sleep better, feel better at 4 pm every day (at the moment I tank completely, every day, no matter what).  And if I have more energy, I'll clean more.  I'll read Lulu more books.  I'll think of ways to change the world and get on it.  And then!  I'll be happier because the house will be cleaner, and Lulu and I will have hung out more as opposed to me lying pathetically on the couch with the (HATE to admit this) tv on.  Just sometimes.  Not every day!  Ok sometimes every day.  It depends. 

But I want to change the pattern.  I want to feel better so that I live better.  

And I realize sugar can't be the ONLY thing between me and happiness and peace on earth.  But ditching it might free me up to live a little more the way I was made to.  

I will keep you posted on that.  

Days of our lives

Someone (Annie Dillard?) once said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.   This either haunts me (why am i on facebook right now!?) or deeply relieves me, depending on the day.  A lot of my days lately have felt... mundane.  You know when you're in high school and college how summer means road trips, traveling to new countries, exploring new internships, new places to live, new room mates, new people to meet (new boys to have crushes on), new ways to make coffee...  Well.  That's what I subconsciously long for in the summer.  And yet this summer, this season, my life is the same as it was spring, winter, fall, the previous summer...  I take a shower in the same shower.  I make coffee the same way.  I go to the same (wonderful) farmer's market.  I wake up in the same (not so wonderful) bed with the same (most-of-the-time wonderful) guy.  Except when we get adventurous and sleep in the guest room because unfolded clean laundry has taken over our bedroom and refuses to put itself away.  

I digress.

The point is, I find myself aching for adventure.  For mountains and beaches and sunsets over unfamiliar landscape.  

But.

My suspicion is that I am living some of the best days of my life right now.  As bored as I feel sometimes, when I stop and notice my toddler exploring the boundary of our nearby pond with her toes, tracing the reflections of clouds in the water with her fingers and watching them dissolve into ripples,  surrendering to her request that I, too, dip my feet in the fishy water.  I imagine I will look back on that moment with such delight and jealousy of my past self.  

I have never actually been happier in my life. 

And I know this. I just keep forgetting.  In fact, I'm wondering, as I type this, if I have not typed almost exactly the same post before.  Several times.  I'm afraid to check.

The problem with memory, like the telephone game, is that you can keep repeating things over and over, but eventually the message gets distorted.  Over time, you have less and less connection at all to the resolve and inspiration and clarity of past moments.  We only really have access to the people and ponds that our feet are dipped in currently.  There is only now.

Which is why I will probably keep on posting the same thing again and again.  Because I have to discover it all over again every day.   

Here's the rest of Annie's quote.  

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern. 

So here I am.  In my little mock up of reason and order.  Blogging.  Working.  Raising a tiny wild little bear.  Falling more and more in love with an even wilder bear.  And following the mysterious trail of the holy.