divine dissatisfaction

I see my buddy quite a bit. We play basketball and talk about shit and eat and give each other real answers to real questions. He is cool and smart and hilarious, and sometimes super, super obnoxious. He's my 4-year old nephew Reggie. 

Being 4 ("and 3/4s!"), Reggie carries with him the risk of, at any of time, bursting into major, emotional flames. His tantrums, like those of most kids his age, have the ability to completely annihilate the semblance of order that we all contribute to and exist within on a daily basis. In comparison to his 1-year old brother, though, Reggie is way more chill, and has become that way gradually as he's aged.

His growth, while about as normal as shitty diapers (but way more welcome by all of us), is intriguing to me for two reasons. 

First, it means that he is responding to his environment in a way that makes him more successful. Just like his brother, who upon finding his own two legs can now walk and access the world as never before, Reggie has realized that there is some social benefit to "going with the flow". Reggie is getting socialized before our very eyes. 

Which brings us to the second reason that Reggie (and any kid) is interesting: socialization is always accompanied by a special sort of human torture called "fitting in".  All of us, at all of our stages, are trying to figure out how to fit into the world around us--our jobs, our families, our work--just like Reggie. But fitting is always about trying to reconcile what makes us different from each other with what makes us the same. When a kid, any kid, stops herself from crying, or sits quietly at the table, she is both becoming a citizen in the grand social project and silencing her own incredible, unique personality. The problem is: we all need both, from ourselves and from each other, to thrive. 

As Martha Graham said once in reference to artists (but actually about life):

“There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissastifaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive...”

honor your creativity

How often do we say what we mean? How many times a day do we think through things long enough to actually believe them to be true? 

I would guess that most of the time, for most of us, the message has to stop--like a busy train--at 8 different distractions on its way to its final destination. So rarely these days are we uninterrupted that we forget what it feels like, and why it is so important. 

In almost every vocation that requires (or at least invites) deep, critical thought, people who can spend the mental energy to engage with what they are doing come out ahead. And the ability to spend that energy necessarily requires having the space to be uninterrupted. 

And here's why it matters: if you can carve out the time to be uninterrupted, and then apply the energy to think deeply, the prize at the end is called creativity. It is the place where new ideas sprout.

While I have thought a lot over the last year about "honoring the creativity" in my life, today I am trying to take a step toward institutionalizing that commitment. In the spirit of Seth Godin, here are the first of some daily words I hope to write. I hope it helps me say what I mean, say things that are true for me, and gives creativity another functional part of my daily life. 

...about eating and cooking.

When I say to you that eating well is not complicated, I mean it. I don't mean: "If you were a better person--a fascist--, healthy eating would be a no-brainer." I also don't mean: "Look how cool I, Mr. Trainer Man, am." I simply mean: "Nailing your diet is as simple as preparing your own food most of the time."

When I started studying nutrition, I was earnestly in search of the holy grail, or the like. I was sure that with so much built up around the process of feeding oneself, there must be a sacrosanct secret or three that dictated why some people felt like statistics documenting our national obesity epidemic while others were just shrugging, asking, "I have thigh-gap--what's your problem?". 

After coaching my first 50 people or so, two things started to dawn very clearly on me:

1. Most people struggle with the same core problem: self-worth.
2. Most of the fitness industry sells the same thing: tips-and-tricks.

How the industry could have gotten so turned around is a topic for another day, as is what I mean about self-worth. But today, I want to talk about cooking. Because when you cook regularly, you think about the food that is going into your body; you're forced to. And when you think--only a little bit, sure, but for many years-- about something, anything...great things happen. 

I like to say that I only have one recipe:

• Take good ingredients. 
• Prepare (cut? mix? apply heat? salt to taste?) 
• Eat.

Like that? I challenge you to show me one recipe that is not THAT at it's core the above--and no, your sea-cucumber merangue "pearls" don't count, Ms. Chef-y Pants.

Joking aside, I think most people make their mistakes at the two outer edges of the normal daily consumption spectrum: they literally don't think about what is going into their mouth at all, or they think about it WAY TOO MUCH. 

On the one hand, there definitely has to be some rules that establish the "floor" as far as eating goes, things like:

• don't eat much refined sugar or drink much alcohol
• don't be stuffed or starving very often
• if it comes out of a factory, don't pretend that it is something you should eat

These rules will be somewhat variable from person to person (what "much" means, for example), but they  vary way less than the standard "fitpro" would have you believe. After all, as many other have pointed out, Paleo and Vegan diets are, at their core, pretty similar. In my mind, the basics are pretty universal, and they help us stay "off the WALL-E ship"... 

WALL-E, Pixar, 2009

On the other hand, focusing TOO much on what we're eating has some serious issues, in that we all have a pretty limited quantity of will-power to focus hard on things. Simply, if something is a challenge, we have a fixed daily ability to grapple with it. When we run out of that daily will-power, we go into something I call Will-Power Debt. And debt sucks! mostly because it pulls on resources from the future. In the end, you haven't changed much ('cause the going got tough, and you quit), you're bitter that you even focused on that hard thing in the first place ('cause now you're exhausted), and you think you're a failure ('cause a "better" person would have "gotten going", as the saying goes).

Somewhere in the middle of the drawing above, though, higher than brain-dead but not quite all the way to the right (and definitely not OBSESSED), is a path of a little resistance. It's not quite lounge-chair comfortable but it's also not ascetic, and it is where change almost always happens. It's a place where you can handle any obstacle, because you take it day by day. It's a place where you care only a little bit, but for a long time.

And in that place, they only serve simple food, cooked at home.