routine, glorious routine

Children are getting bored (although they say they love summer vacation and hate school), parents are getting antsy. Summer is waning, the local tomatoes don't get any better than this, it is high pesto time, and we are approaching Labor Day fast. Schools have sent out supply lists, the children are relishing their last days of endless sleep, laziness and boredom, and we, the parents, are enjoying the last days of no-school-routine.

During the summer months bedtime was undefined and breakfast on your own, beds remained unmade, dinner was late, my yoga routine went bye-bye, and work came and went in spurts for me, unorganized and interrupted.

It is time to revert back to our school day routines. For me that means getting up early to make school lunches for my teens, having a sit-down family breakfast, tidying the house and making the beds before going about my work in peace and quiet and one long undisturbed stretch until the afternoon, putting on lipstick every morning, organizing after-school activities, cooking dinner every night, and making sure there is a bedtime.

We need the looseness of summer to enjoy the rigor and organization of the rest of the year, and vice versa. They complement each other in a yin yang kind of way the way week-end vs. week day routines do (see an earlier post on that).

receiving graciously

In a way we all want to be loved and accepted and patted on the back for it. But being a supposed goody two-shoes and feeling guilty about accepting a present is misconstrued.

A while ago we gave a friend's daughter a money gift upon her graduation and received a thank-you card back with an added note saying "you didn't have to do that." I know that phrase. I have heard it often among family members and it circulates widely. A few years ago I was playing money tag with my housekeeper. I paid her, she gave me some money back because she thought she had worked less than what I paid her for, but then I stuck the money back into her purse wanting to be generous. She finally put an end to our money tag and said something like "You need to let people give to you." The Japanese have the complicated social custom of giri, a kind of reciprocal indebtedness incurred when giving a larger present.

Think about the feelings that come up for you when you get a present versus when you give a present, especially one that you have selected particularly carefully or that took a long time to create. Oftentimes, I get more of a charge out of giving and seeing the surprise and pleasure on the receiver's face than receiving. But that twisted fact makes us so mutually intertwined that we need to become as gracious a receiver as being a gracious giver. Let others give to you and relish receiving.

about being a sugar cop

We are navigating a difficult food world, fraught with so much misinformation and downright inaccuracies. Just think of the cholesterol and fat myths that caused the egg white omelet and "lite" fat syndromes, and that were proven wrong in the end. Especially as mothers, in charge of food and the health and wellbeing of our families, it's like stepping through a minefield these days. And even though we want the healthiest foods for our families we have to police within reason without becoming rigid fundamentalists about it.

Many teens in this country develop a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, because the culture is too fundamental about it - no alcohol, none, until you are 21. Of course this forbidden fruit becomes super desirable, and college binge drinking is a real problem. When I grew up in France kids would get a drop of red wine into their water with dinner, and the older the children became the pinker the wine would become - more drops of wine were added. There the children are brought up to drink responsibly and in moderation within the family environment, no need for binge drinking.

In my wider circle of acquaintances there are some sugar cops. Granted that sugar is unhealthy in large quantities (like anything in excess), that we have a diabetes epidemy in this country, that many are literally addicted to sugar. No wonder. Big Food has put sugar into just about everything and the sugar lobbies are going strong. I find most American dessert recipes (cookies, cakes, puddings, ice cream) too sweet and cut the sugar amount by about 1/3. I also find that many breads have sugar in them (sugar in bread, say what?), that bottled salad dressings are really sugary (just use oil and vinegar), and that the super sweet corn tastes like candy (yuk).

It's just that abstinence and prohibition always seem to achieve the exact opposite of what we are aiming for. Yes, I used to skim from my kids' Halloween bags, every day a bit, so it wouldn't be so noticeable, to reduce the pile. Yet, I wouldn't make them throw it all in the trash or donate it to the local dentist (who would in turn donate it to overseas troops - why should they eat the poison?). They were allowed to eat it (some), although for Easter and St. Nicholas they get good dark chocolate instead of candy.   I used to allow each of my kids to choose one of those colorful sugary mainstream cereals once a year, and take them to a fast food place just before school starts in the fall.

So we learn by comparison. It's just as important to experience the opposite in order to crystalize out the healthy choices. If your thinking is balanced and makes sense, if you model "good behavior" (and don't sneak a candy bar when you think they are not looking, or drink excessively at a party in plain sight) your children will get your arguments about healthy and balanced choices. Then you'll come out on top and so will they.

pizza every night?

How boring. I'd rather eat something different every night. And from all over the world, too. We are so fortunate nowadays to have access to such a great selection of foods. We are exposed to so much diversity. Japanese sushi, Moroccan tagine, French snails, Middle Eastern mezze, downhome hamburgers, Italian pasta, Russian borscht, and on and on.... For that same reason, - enjoying diversity - , traveling is so eye opening because we get to see how other people live (and eat, and think). We need to get out of the house to learn to expand our vision because we learn through comparison. Comparison and juxtaposition show us alternatives, options, different ways of doing things. Only when we know what our options are can we begin to choose. Homogenization - a Walmart or Starbucks on every corner no matter how far from home we go, or pizza every night, or the same religion for all - makes us culturally poor and life dull.

But with diversity we must learn tolerance. You don't have to have sushi, but it's great that it's available for those who like it. Let's enjoy the possibilities and excitement that diversity affords us instead of hitting those with different opinions or preferences over the head. As Frederic the Great said, "Jeder soll nach seiner Façon seelig werden," or "each must live as he sees fit."

no to TV

We have no television, never have, never will.   Although it's nice to save a few dollars on cable, that's not why.   And don't get me wrong, we love good movies and do watch them. What I'm really talking about is a totally different reason for not having television, the one that Waldorf schools have advocated all along. Television with its massive amounts of manipulative commercials that constantly disrupt programs and the stream of thought, and with all those pictures of ugly events, from natural disasters to man-made ones, creates a distorted and highly negative picture of the world. Weather predictions, too, are designed to create hype. Think of the nervous anticipation the weather people create before a winter storm or a heat wave (and sometimes nothing much manifests and you could have spared yourself all that adrenaline). When, on top of that you hear the same story repeated over and over and over over the course of a day or two or three the nervy effect is cumulative and highly toxic.

Not only does it feed our anxiety level, another consequence is our heightened need for safety and security to compensate for this seemingly dangerous world. Think of it, teachers wish the kids a "safe summer" before summer vacation. When friends go travelling we wish them a "safe trip." And we hover over our children, taking opportunities away from them to grow and become independent, assess risks on their own, learn to get themselves into a situation and back out. Remember when you were young? I bet you were more independent than your own children are now.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer by far my paper newspaper. I can skim over the ugly stuff, filter it, or read it without that frenetic anxious energy of live on-screen reporting. Without television the energy in our home is a lot more peaceful.

music to my ears

Sounds, just like comforting smells, say of freshly baked apple pie for example, can trigger and evoke memories.   It's as if the sound lodged itself in our cells and replayed certain memories, emotions, or situations from the past that get triggered on command. That way we come to associate a particular sound or piece of music with a particular memory, pleasant or not. The neighbors across from our new house have a rooster that crows on occasion.   I love that sound. The rooster's crowing evokes for me the European countryside together with peacefulness and that dreamy quality of a summer morning or of a languorous Sunday lunch that comes to an end. When I told our neighbor I loved the sound of her rooster she was so happy, saying apologetically that she had thought it might bother people. Not me.

Church bells also bring back nostalgic European childhood memories for me. Over here we don't hear church bells much, and if we do many are electronic, which removes the charm of the sound. But in Europe church bells still sound regularly on the hour or at least on Sundays, not only in small villages but also in big cities. It is a comforting sound to me.

What sounds trigger pleasant memories for you?

feel your body, understand your food

Have you ever gotten up from the table and felt sluggish and stuffed, and perhaps even lethargic after a meal? Has it happened that you've eaten something and then felt your stomach acting up an hour or so later? On the other hand, have you noticed that certain foods energize you, that your stomach feels light after eating them, yet satisfied?   I always yearn for lots of greens, raw or sautéd, and my stomach feels light after I eat them. When I eat meat in larger quantities, on the other hand, my stomach feels heavy and full. My husband says that cheese and wheat clog him up.  

You can learn to tune in to your body and understand which foods are beneficial for your particular digestive system. Science wished there were a one-kind-fits-all diet.  But that is just not so. Nature is complex, and we are complex.Think of extreme diets like that of the Masaai in Africa (beef, blood, milk) or the Inuit diet that consists mostly of fish and other marine protein. These peoples' stomachs would rebel if prescribed the Mediterranean Diet.  Yet, the Mediterranean Diet has been touted as the world's healthiest. I like it very much, but I come from Northern Europe and rye bread, sauerkraut, and butter all work well for my system, too.   Or how about the raw food diet (just another craze, we do need a balanced mix of raw and cooked foods), or the Paleo Diet, which often has been misconstrued to contain lots of meat (hunter-gatherers ate little meat and only perennial plants since there was no agriculture yet, ergo no annual grains).  And let's not forget veganism (beware - especially in childhood and adolescence we need protein to develop the brain).

It helps to understand your ethnic heritage, which can be a bit of challenge in this country when your heritage is something exotic like Irish-Italian, or Japanese-Spanish. Our digestive systems tune into the plants and animals in our particular geographic area over hundreds and even thousands of years. They even claim that our digestive systems haven't yet fully adapted to the annual grains our agriculture of the past 10,000 years has brought forth.

So lean in to your body, tune in, learn to read your digestive system's signals, - good and bad -, and let them tell you a story of what works for you, what makes you feel good, what energizes you.

chaos before order

Seems that order must be preceded by chaos.When I decide to rearrange and reorganize my daughter's closet I pull everything out, throw it on the bed and floor, then sort and fold all the clothes anew, before placing them neatly back in the closet.When the kitchen pantry cabinets need to be cleaned, everything comes out and gets spread all over the counters, gets inspected, the kitchen looks accordingly, and once the shelves are clean all the food bags are returned in neat and orderly fashion.

They say that creativity breeds better in disorder, and that creative people usually have unorganized working areas.Not sure whether that should be an excuse to be messy?But from chaos arises order.I am hopeful.

more chaos

My own life is currently in disarray as we have begun to pack up the house we have lived in for more than twenty years.We find things we forgot about long ago, even silly things like refrigerator alphabet magnets (yes, we have been here for a long time), and my daughter is hopeful she'll find her long lost library card.It's a great opportunity for clean-up, for sorting things out that just take up space but have become obsolete, for clearing house literally.No need to move things we no longer need or want.I have already given two pick-up truck loads of stuff to a local shelter.

Since I am usually very organized, and since I clearly like order, predictability and harmony, all this is quite unsettling for me.But change is good and change is in order.It's time for a fresh start.The freaky thing is that the technology around us also seems to reflect the current chaos, external and internal.We have been experiencing internet problems in recent weeks, although it's been checked and rechecked and supposedly nothing is wrong.A telephone problem was diagnosed and fixed.The dryer (that I usually don't use) stopped working, then luckily came back when we unplugged it and plugged it back in.And I have a really weird bug in my bookkeeping system since the switchover to the computer I'll be using in my new home office. 

To creative chaos in preparation for new and improved order!

on quietude

We have been living in a very old house in the countryside on a fairly busy road for the past two decades. Before that we lived in New York City, where you hear car alarms and fire trucks at all hours of day and night, and where there is always background noise. As a matter-of-fact, except for a few years when I was young, I have always lived in big noisy cities. You do get used to the constant background noise, but it becomes like a chronic illness. After a while you only notice how noisy it is, when there is silence in between. I know they say that quiet comes from within. But then they also say that we create what we connect with, what we need, what we are attracted to.  When I was young I was always looking for inspiration from the outside - travel, experiences, moving to yet another place, or starting another career. You can create a certain amount of inner quiet, but at one point or another, peace and quiet around you are helpful for tuning out chatter, staying grounded, concentrating on your work, and promoting peace and balance.

It is wonderfully grounding and balancing to just sit in nature with no other noises than chirping birds, buzzing bees, the wind quietly sweeping through the grass, or the waves of a lake lapping at the shore - and in between utter silence, nothing. No electronic beeps and alerts, no planes overhead (just heard one), no cars passing by (several just drove past), no phones ringing (yep, just rang), no kitchen machines running in the background (I hear the faint noise of the dishwasher humming). All those mechanical human made sounds are less harmonious to our ears and grate at you after a while.

Inner and outer silence make room for creativity, for concentration, for going deep within. It's what they mean by a pregnant pause - the in-between space, the space that came before the Big Bang. This space is empty but so full of potential.  I am looking forward to this quietude as a basis for increased creativity in the coming years.  When I open the windows in our new house all I hear is birds singing, the wind swishing through the trees, and occasionally the neighbor's rooster crowing (ahh, such a European countryside sound to my ears, love it).  Pure bliss.

the war against evil?

Have you ever wondered why there is so much warfare, strife, and conflict out there? Mother Teresa supposedly replied to an invitation to participate in an anti-war demonstration by saying: "You can invite me when you are planning a pro-peace event." The perspective is fundamentally different.

Ask yourself how you think. We tend to be against certain politics, hate such-and-such a person, dislike fish, mind the rain, despise the humidity, or have a dust allergy. In summary, we very much know everything we don't like. The problem with that perspective is that it creates adversity and conflict, inside ourselves and outside in the world around us. It reinforces the negative. When we can't get along with our neighbor because he mows his lawn at odd hours, and we dislike him for it and stop talking to him, we create conflict. When we can't have a spirited but civil dinner table conversation with a person of the other political party, we create conflict. When we spray pesticides on the little critters in the garden, we create conflict. When we forbid our children certain activities or certain behavior, it creates conflict.

How about looking at it the other way round, in the affirmative? This refocuses our outlook on what we like, on what we want, and want more of. How about rewarding your children (even just with kind words) for the type of behavior you would like to see more of? How about marching for peace? How about modeling the behavior you would like to see in others? How about making a list of all the things and people you do appreciate? How about remembering everything that went right today?

The war within and without keep going if we keep feeding the fire. How about starving that fire, instead?