Four days to catch up on. It's been chaos here! We've been so busy, my little ones have been awake at night, I've barely slept until last night. Nothing in particular is happening, we're just really busy! My husband's had some late nights working from home, there seems to have been more housework to do than normal for some reason, and the kids are waking at night in tag-team so that one night I was up for four hours straight. Usually they both sleep all night so it was a rude shock to be back in the weird world of sleep deprivation again!
I've stuck with eating mostly raw food throughout, and it's not been a problem. I haven't been using the program's recipes - with our busyness it's been easier to grab simple salads and fruit and handfuls of nuts rather than concentrate on new recipes. I am, however, looking forward to making the recipes over the next few weeks until I've tried them all.
As for exercise, are you kidding?? Tomorrow. Tomorrow is Saturday and I'm not working, so there's plenty of opportunity to get back on the bike. I've re-jigged my goal for Around the Bay in a Day. Doing the full loop (250k's) this year is going to be a huge stretch. If I'm going to do it I want to enjoy it, which means I'd need to train properly, and realistically with uni and the kids and work I'm not going to be able to pump out 6 or 8 hour rides on the weekends. It's a bigger training time committment than running a marathon. So I'm going to do the 100km option this year. My husband will do the whole loop and I'll catch a train to Sorrento, meet him, and try and hold his wheel back to Melbourne :-). I know I could go out and ride 100kms tomorrow with no training, I've ridden my bike enough in the past to know what to do and how to pace myself. This decision has taken the presure off hugely, I feel really happy with it, and I've still got something to train for (so I can do it fast!!). I'll do the 250k option the year after I finish uni. Those roads aren't going anywhere!
Some of the happiness exercises from the past few days have been:
--- Write about a dream you had for your life that you gave up:
Mountaineering. For years I dreamed of climbing big, technical mountains. Peaks over 8000 metres. Remote, technial, no-rescue-possible stuff in Patagonia. K2. I read everything I could and I had my plan and when I was 21 I joined an expedition in Nepal. It wasn't anything fancy - it was a trip run by a tour company, and while I needed to have clearance from a doctor, basically anyone who was fit and healthy would have been allowed to sign up. It wasn't a technical climbing trip and no climbing experience was necessary. I did it because someone I loved had died in a climbing accident and I realised that life is short, and if there was something I wanted to do I had to do it immediately in case the chance to do it was taken from me. So instead of starting with a technical moutnaineering course in New Zealand and working my way up to bigger and more difficult climbs, I decided to spend my trust fund to get to the Himalayas asap. And rather than go to the places I could manage on my own, I signed up with the tour complany to go somewhere I lacked the experience and knowledge to get to myself. Somewhere more challenging, more remote, and more 'raw' (!!) than the places most tourists visit.
So why did I give up on my mountaineering dream? Well, on that trip I had issues with altitude - I couldn't go over 5580 metres, and the smallest of the two summits we attempted was 5950 metres, so I missed out on both summits. After that I realised that mountaineering wasn't for me what I tought it would be. It wasn't a transcendental experience, and it had little relationship to rock climbing (which was my passion at the time). It was basically walking slowly in very little oxygen, and feeling sick and hurting the entire time, for weeks at a time. The spectacular scenery grabbed my heart, it's true, but since that trip I've had no desire to climb peaks again. I'd rather walk quietly among them in a quieter, less aggressive, subtler manner. I now dream of going back to the Himalayas, and just sitting, watching.
--- Write about a dream you still have for your life.
Oh, so many! Travel is a huge passion of mine and I dream about travelling to all sorts of places, speaking lots of languages, staying for ages, and getting to know places that most people don't.
Another happiness exercise was to listen deeply, and write about whatever that activity motivated me to write about. I focused on concentrating deeply (taking the term 'listening' rather metaphorically) on the way I felt after eating anything. It's enlightening! It turns out that honey, raw honey, doesn't make me feel great. It's subtle but I noticed it, where I'd never focused enough to notice before. And it turns out that hommus made from cooked chick peas is fine for me! so is wholemeal bread if I don't eat much.
One really interesting happiness exercise was directed at those wanting to transition into their dream career. The exercise is to spend the first hour of each day working on that career. I am three quarters through a teaching degree. It's taking years because I'm doing it part time, but I'll finish at the end of next year. My semester starts next week, and I love the idea of getting up an hour earlier each day and doing uni work (will I love that idea when the alarm rings? I'll have to go to bed earlier). We'll see!
I'm making one more change to my life. I'm a list writer. Give me a goal and I'll give you a list of steps to get there. I love lists. They make me feel in control. Writing a list gives a warm, satisfying feeling of having done something tangible and constructive. I've written lists of things I'd love to buy or make to transform our little place into an organisational oasis. Lists of things to do to make my photography business a reality. Lists of races to enter. And hundreds of meal plans and exercise programs that I've never even begun to stick to. I'm realising that these lists are actually doing me no favours. Instead of writing the blessed list I could be doing something concrete and positive to actually get to the goal! The list is not a thing that achieves the goal! It's not a real thing, it;s a crutch that distracts me from the fact that I haven't actually done anything! And writing the list feels so good that once it is written, I bask in the satisfied glow of having completed the list, mentally congratulate myself, set the list neatly aside without doing a single thing it says. So, no more lists! Whenever I'm tempted to write a list I'm instead doing something that will lead to results. So now my house looks like a bomb has hit it as I am in the middle of 'spring cleaning' and reorganisation! The lounge room is a calm oasis, the hallway cupboard is an organised joy to behold, the rest of the place is a work in progress :-).
Whether that last paragraph is relevant to raw food or not I'm not sure, except that having the program has freed me from writing my own shopping list and menu plan, and the liberation I feel caused me to reflect on lists in general and their role in my life. So I bid them farewell.
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