30 Days of Happiness: Day 17, Less Stuff

I love baskets.  Nothing creates the illusion of order better than a basket.  When I shove the stuff I haven’t done yet in a basket, at least it is all in one place and unlikely to get lost.  What could be simpler?

Well.  It’s that illusion part that gets me.  For this challenge, I tackled four baskets.  The first one was an overflowing recycling basket, so that was just a warm up.  It did make a big difference in the feel of my office, however.

The next two baskets were full of bathroom stuff.  I tossed out a bottle of hairspray that I bought when I was in Australia in hopes that it might keep my hair from flying everywhere when I took the ferry from place to place.  In my normal life:  totally useless.  I disposed of the fantasy that I’m ever going to establish a skin care regime that involves anything more complicated than washing my face and the bottles that accompanied it.  Travel bottles in unhelpful sizes and shapes?  Gone.  The everyday basket is now clean and usable and the occasional use basket (nail polish remover, sunscreen, stuff for rashes…) doesn’t have anything I will never use again.

The basket on the kitchen island was a nice little black hole.  My garden journal lives there.  All the articles and such that I clipped out are now actually inside the journal, rather than wadded up near it in the basket.  The seed packets are rubber-banded together for planting when it is really spring and not pretend spring.  Recipes to try are clipped together.  All the pens in the pen jar in the basket work.  Recycling, odd leaves, screws to God knows what, crumpled ribbons, a random button, two broken seashells, and a dilapidated feather have been purged.  I got around to putting the things away that were in the basket “for now.”  I found 35 cents and two tacks.

Four baskets down, more to go.

30 Days of Happiness: Day 16, Simplicity

I like simple.  Simple is easy to clean, peaceful, socially responsible, and economically beneficial.  It is about the essential, not necessarily in the utilitarian sense, but in the sense that it meets the needs.  My favorite pot, for example, is both useful and beautiful as well as simple.

Making simple, however, sometimes gets complicated.  I like uncluttered space, but I also enjoy having photos and gizmos and toys on my shelves.  I don’t like storing tons of stuff, but I do like having craft supplies for times when I want to use them.

When I get tired, or lazy, or scared, things become complicated.  I don’t think clearly and realize that the things scattered everywhere are not necessary.  This is why most of my epiphanies begin with cleaning.  Once I start cleaning up and clearing away, literally or figuratively, answers emerge.  Sometimes I don’t like the answers very much, but at least I then have space to change the answers.  Worst case, everything smells better clean.

30 Days of Happiness: Day 15

I read the title of today’s happiness challenge and internally screeched.  “You are filled with loving kindness” is a family joke, something the kids say to me when I am stressed for the fun of hearing me expostulate and then laugh.  Let’s just say that I foolishly told them about the anxiety that particular sentence induced in me in one of my previous attempts to learn to meditate.  Thankfully, that particular sentence did not occur in today’s meditation.

I sat and did the meditation.  The first thing I noticed was that I did not feel like jumping up and killing people, which tended to happen with the previous experiment.  Progress!  In fact, I felt calm and peaceful.

This will probably never be my favorite kind of meditation, but I learned from trying it again with an open mind.

30 days of happiness, day 12 (day 11 was exercise, and I've covered that...)

I am finding that it is nearly impossible to write about food without writing about my entire life, so I’m just going to jump in and tell the stories.  The foods of my childhood all came in boxes and cans.  My mother is not a morning person and does not enjoy cooking.  My brother and I learned early to get ourselves our (brightly colored, sugary) cereal and milk.  In high school, I ate a doughnut and a Coke for breakfast every day.  When Crayola came out with macaroni and cheese as a color, I recognized the color of my childhood, the orange powder of magic.  I was not encouraged to experiment in the kitchen, lest I make a mess.  At the same time, every bite of dinner I ate or did not eat was scrutinized, commented on, analyzed.  I was always eating too much or too little.  My preferences were mocked.  My mom had been fat as a child.  She dieted like crazy to lose weight in high school, but that fat child has never really left her.  Her weight continues to be an issue.  She has tried every diet program ever, sometimes losing weight, always gaining it back.  I didn’t think about any of this.  It was just how it was.

Then I went to college.  I learned to try new foods.  I tried foods I thought I didn’t like and discovered that how something is cooked makes a huge difference.  (Current personal guideline for evaluating restaurant menus:  try whatever I haven’t had before or what is more complicated than I am willing to cook at home.)  I cooked things myself, making huge messes in the kitchen and feeling fine about it because I was the one who was going to clean it up.  I began to realize that maybe food wasn’t an endless reward and punishment system.  And I gained weight because I still didn’t know how to build healthy eating habits.

I got a lot healthier during and after my first pregnancy.  I lost ten pounds in the first four months with morning sickness.  I lost the baby weight and more after Syd was born.  I was not the thin little thing I had been in high school, but I was doing all right.  The second baby didn’t change things much.

Major depression and divorce brought new realizations.  Under stress, I will eat more, until the point where I can’t eat at all.  I had worked that out, more or less, and was nearly a healthy weight when I remarried.

My husband is a big man.  He struggles with his weight and his own difficult relationship with food.  We both gained weight after we married.  I am not a very picky eater, so I tended to eat along the lines of what he preferred, which didn’t work well for me.  Eventually, I figured it out.  I also discovered how much I love exercise.  Those two things helped me lose the extra weight.

Over the last months, my weight has been creeping up again.  I know it is because I am not making good food choices.  Sometimes, of the things I want, the only ones I can have are the ones that are edible.  I am learning that I don’t have to eat All The Foods.

I am a little hesitant to outline the perfect food rules, because sometimes when I look at the big picture, I panic and head for the ice cream.  However, I am reminding myself that I don’t have to follow all the rules at once, starting this minute.

The rules:

      No Coke (my worst addiction).  Diet Coke is okay until I am ready to deal with the caffeine problem.  Ultimately, no soda.

      No added sugar.  This is a work in progress.  The exception is the honey stuff I eat on long bike rides.

      Reasonable portions.  Must not eat whole house.

      Few packaged foods.  I’m not ready to bake my own bread or make my own spaghetti, but more scratch cooking is better.

      Organic free range sustainable.  Good for me, good for the world.

      More fruits and vegetables.  Fewer fats and meats, less dairy.

      No panicking.  Treats are allowed.