Tag: cheese

Who Shapes You?

Lately, I’ve been reminded how outdated some of my thinking is. Some days, it feels like all of my thinking may be outdated. That is excessively harsh, I expect.

I was raised with the understanding that growing up meant we experimented with life through its various stages to test ourselves and discover who we are.

As children, we try different things (our parents usually make sure we do!) to see if they take hold in our lives and psyches or whether they get tossed. Do you really want to go back for another season of ballet lessons this year? Or maybe you’d rather try karate on for size? Or raising goats?

Today the message and mantra floating around in the Great out there seems simply to be: “Be whoever you need you to be.” To be accepted. To be hired. To be liked. To be loved.

And if whatever that is doesn’t fully synch up with who you are or what you believe, there’s a reason for that:  “Hey. We all need to pay the bills.”

Be yourself? Don’t be ridiculous! Nobody wants any part of that. Listen instead for these insightful messages! “Try this eyeliner with that mascara” intones some teenager, who chirps: “Your eyes are really going to “pop.” (For a time, that saying conjured up quite an image that alarmed me. Until I learned that it meant the eyes would “stand out” and not “pop out.”)

I’ve had a lot of opportunities in my life. I’ve been able to marinate in numerous environments and activities long enough to give me invaluable feedback about who I am and who I am not. These experiences and preferences and I dare say, passions largely influenced and still influence my day-to-day choices and preoccupation.

I grieve the abject superficiality out there in the Great Beyond and yes, the silly sameness of the expectations placed on the current generation. “You are only as good as your last Tik Tok post.” Apparently. And what is the soul-nourishing learning about self that comes from these noisy, public, repetitive posts? “I applied my eyeliner in that video WAY better than she did.” Un-hunh.

That is supposed to build character and inner resilience??

Intrinsic qualities like patience and discernment and willpower aren’t easy to determine in someone at first glance. But they often might be assumed as qualities in someone possessed of quiet grace. Something who doesn’t have anything to show off about or prove.

Maybe that’s when maturity kicks in. Unless you choose to grow old without growing up … that’s common.

I was thinking about things in life that take time to mature to a point where we can enjoy themin their finest incarnation. Their peak of perfection.

Cheese. Fine wines. The vapors and rhythms that swirl in old buildings where the outpourings of legions have been comforted. A love or marriage you have nurtured from Day One (and a few days no doubt before that) with unwavering devotion.

Those values seem to have gone the way of the Dodo bird. But I’m not convinced all that many people are totally buying into the superficiality and sameness. Little wonder the therapy industry is booming and antidepressant sales are off the charts.

When the environment you are in (i.e. the world) does not feed your dreams and passions; if that environment does not allow you the time and space you need to explore yourself in pursuit of your chosen interests; failure to thrive is not a surprising consequence.

The danger is waking up one day to find you “beside yourself” instead of “inside yourself.” May not seem all that far but, trust me; it is a hell of a lot of ground to cover to get back to you when you’ve lost yourself. Or worse, never found yourself in the first place ….

Enough Already

When is enough? I have asked the question before. When do we know we have done enough in aid of what we are trying to achieve in life?

Periodically in life, it is of value to do some stock-taking. An inventory, if you will, of what we have and don’t have. Materially, emotionally, and physically. What we still want and don’t have. What’s good about our life and what has to go.

Life can be marked by patches of plenty and want. The sages out there say that. we increase our chances of getting what we want by being grateful for what we have right now. I have found that this works. Or at the very least, it can relieve the negativity of a situation we’re struggling in.

I believe most of us can live comfortably on quite a bit less than advertisers and social expectations would have us believe. Envy and greed are all too human vulnerabilities that are easily exploited.

If every comfort we seek is outside of us, we have no time to just be alone and luxuriate in our own thoughts. I have found that times of external scarcity were my greatest teachers. I was often terrified as I could not imagine my external circumstances would ever change.

And yet they did. It was true that when one door closed, another opened. It finally became obvious that I was not totally in charge of my ultimate path or destination. We can pursue and wish deeply for what we want in our lives. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

It is what we do with the bare patches in life that shape us the most.

I was a world traveler who sought out the cheapest ways of getting around. I carried only a backpack and valuables in a fanny pack or neck wallet. I was a camping buff as a young adult.

Distilling life down to its barest elements of food, water, warmth, and shelter was clarifying, in a way. It was good to be reminded how little we needed when living like that. We learned – if worse came to worse – we could chuck city trappings and survive on little more than our wits, a canteen of fresh water, and a couple of cans of beans. Or the French equivalent was a baguette, cheese, and a cheap bottle of red wine.

By living poor, I also learned a lot about grace. I once trekked in the Himalayas in Nepal. One afternoon, I went to lie down and set up camp by a small building in a village. A young girl of about 14 years old and some friends came by to watch what I was doing.

When she realized I was planning to sleep there in the open that night, she panicked. “No sleeping, no sleeping,” she said frantically while motioning across her neck with her thumb. “Man come… killing.” That night, I was happy to crawl into my sleeping bag laid out on the dirt floor of her parents’ small village hut.

The next morning I was served the most delicious eggs I ever had that had been cooked in a black bottom pan over an open fire pit in the middle of the hut. That memory has stayed with me. It is a story of how my life may have been saved out of the blue by a caring little girl. The other lesson I came away with was how rich their life seemed to be in one of the poorest places on earth.

I am currently stock-taking. As we prepare to move to a new house, I look around this house to see what needs to go with us to the new one. There is so much that will be left behind. Deliberately.

It feels odd to be at the place where we are ready to offload the possessions we have spent a lifetime accumulating. It does seem that is the way it goes. A less cluttered house – we hope – will allow for more living and creating. Me with my words and my husband at his easel.

I admire and I’m a little envious of those sage souls who know from very early on what they want to be and how they will live their life. It is a special kind of blessing. My life has been more of a trial-and-error experience. It has led me down various side roads and byways. It took many years of experiments to arrive at a place where life works for us.

Perhaps, put differently, we learn to be at peace with what is and accept what we have with gratitude and grace. I don’t waste too much time these days unpacking the hows and whys of the journey I took to get here. I feel profoundly lucky that I did.