I love it when my perceptions get challenged and I am forced to look at something from a different angle. Today my cycling Bud and I hit the spinning class at the vulgar hour of 9:30am on a Sunday morning. We pedalled our legs to jelly (mmmmh…food) and as we walked out she said “Do you feel like you will finish, the race?” I flippantly replied, “I don’t know and if on the day, I feel like I can’t, I won’t feel bad dropping out.” We know each other really well and she got confused, “But how can you train and not finish? You have finished massive things at work and on all sorts of other things, how could you NOT finish the race? We have to finish…” I was kind of stumped because I know that if on the day, I feel sick, exhausted or just bored, I could just give up. I could see a muffin stand and go “Aaaah, a muffin” and sit down and never get up again, well for the race anyway.

Why would I train to not do something? I will always finish something I HAVE to finish. This falls into a category I may or may not WANT to finish. The goal for me is not the race. The goal is to get really fit and healthy and hopefully complete the race too. The goal for my Bud is to finish the race so that she will do more exercise next time. Does this make me a finisher or a quitter? I need to noodle on this and see what I come up with. Never had to think this before….

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Do days have personalities or am I stirring an all new Nature / Nurture Debate? This thought came into my head yesterday as I was trying to find something to wear and has lingered. I have never liked Thursdays. I would not go as far as saying it is my least favourite day of the week, but if pushed, it probably is. What is it about Thursday that offends my sensibilities? What has poor Thursday done to meet with my curled lip and a “Meh”? I think days of the week may have personalities or we have given them ones based on how we use them. I might have stumbled on a new “psychological” phenomenon that will take the researchers years to untangle and debate. Is this the new nature, nurture debate?

Why don’t I like Thursdays? Thursday, to me is kind of clingy. The week is not over, but she sits next to much more glam sister Friday and whines. I have never known what to wear on a Thursday, my clothes don’t seem to match because they have been used up by Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and now sit there in an odd assortment of possibly turning to me to Grunge Fashion or Nudism. Friday knows her stuff. She is confident and upbeat. She holds the promise of freedom, like the last day of term at school. She is hot, she knows it, but she is not arrogant. Thursday simpers next to her, instead of asserting herself to BE something. Saturday is any thing you want to make her. She can do anything from the relaxing yoga guru to the high powered marathon runner. Talented and forward thinking! Sunday, I like, but she is the grandmother of the week, proud of her grandchildren (the previous days of her week), slightly nostalgic and somethimes sitting calming saying “Oi vey, another week”. Sunday only sometimes, get miserable around 7pm, like a friend who is a bit maudlin. Monday, I don’t mind. I am an “up and at ’em” kind of girl. Monday to me is always a fresh start, a clean slate an opportunity to shine. Tuesday, is a bit like Thursday, if you haven’t shone on Monday, Tuesday punishes you with how much you still have to go through. To me, Tuesday is the personal trainer, tough love, with a glimmer of hope. Wednesday knows she is the pivot point, “hump day”, she is positive and energetic. Which takes me back to Thursday and you know how I feel about her, so I will say no more!

What do you think? Is it just me? Is it the nature of the days or did we nuture them this way with our expectations? I am off now to play with Friday, my buddy who is uncomplicated…

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Let”s talk about what I call “Generalised Crankiness Disorder”. It is not classified in the DSM IV yet, but I am hoping I am ahead of the pack and a thought leader on this. GCD occurs for me when things I love doing get thrown out of kilter and then I feel it descending on me like a fog.

Take this morning for instance, I am really into Joanne Fedler’s book “Eat when Hungry.” I like to read on the train on the way to work. It is MY time and I get precious little of that. So the thirty minutes that I am gently rocked into the city, sometimes on schedule, sometimes not, could be an enormous waste of time. Instead, I have turned it into something precious and fiercely guarded. I coccoon myself with my favourite “tone setting” music on my ipod, I check Facebook and I swallow books whole, burping out content at the end of my journey and rubbing my stomach in satisfied glee (Yes, the food analogy is not lost on me!).

Except today when I left my book at home! And as I got to the station I felt the irritating descent of GCD. I like my routine. Is that sad? I like that I have turned the mundane into a spectacular opportunity that no one can mess with and I hate it when I muck that up. So there I sat on the train with a decision, do I go with the GDC? Or do I “feel it file it” and move on? I know what the answer should be but I feel like wallowing in my lost opportunity. Again with the iritation of loss! Pehaps I have to look at how I embrace loss and not feel like a petulant child in its presence? We are not taught to sit with uncomfortable emotions. We are rescued from them by well meaning carers, who rush in to “make things better”. I know, I have spent 18 years trying to make sure my daughter NEVER feels a negative emotion. Probably my well-intentioned clumsiness in this regard has actually inadvertantly caused a few! Would I have done better just holding her and saying it is okay, it is generalised crankiness condition, this too shall pass, rather than saying cheer up? Feelings are just feelings and if we sit with them long enough they too shall pass. But once acknowledged, the next time they come around they don’t sting an open wound.

Just as the comfortableness of the uncomfortableness was starting to feel okay, my bubbly, hyper-manic, gorgeous friend rings me. As I answer quietly, whispering “I am on the train”, she kicks it up a notch as she LOVES catching me on my commute and saying outrageous things while I reply with a muted “mmmh hhhhe” to the crowded carriage. And with that the crankiness cracked into a mischievous grin and my day started in a much better way. Thanks, Bud! Generalised Crankiness Disorder is lifted by acknowledgement, light and laughter. SO much better than reaching for a muffin and chewing on it…

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There are two things that I think I have clung to since I was a child, the avoidance of loss and the feeling of fullness. I liked them both. Perhaps genetically, I come from a long line of shepherds, but I like to know that my people and things that I love are accounted for when I go to bed at night. If one “lamb” was missing, I would be an anxious, little mess as a child. I have learnt to mask this anxiety as an adult, but fundamentally the feeling still bubbles under the surface, sometimes unacknowledged and unconscious.

I don’t do loss very well, certainly not of anything I truly love. Friends, I have collected from when I was as young as six, are still in my life; people I love, fill a space in my heart and if they leave, the shape of the space they created deflates and I don’t like the feeling of emptiness. I need the fullness of my peeps. I also like the feeling of fullness after a meal, surrounded by the people I love. Maybe that is the Italian in me, but that is the ultimate bliss. So musing on this I turned my thoughts to my own emigration (I am reading Joanne Fedler’s book and it is certainly similar). In emigrating, I lost the ability to “count my sheep” as I got into bed at night. I had no idea where they were, in fact they were prancing around in daylight, wide-awake while I was dreaming on the other side of the world. One loses a lot when one abandons your home, your culture, your music, your life and starts over. I gained a lot too and have been enormously blessed, but it made me really hate loss even more!

So how does this translate to weight loss. It just feels like another loss I have to endure, another emptiness, another deflation of a space that something I loved used to occupy. Yes, there is a gain. Just like my wonderful new home, that gave me an amazing career, more freedom than I ever dreamed of, the ability to build wealth in a stable currency, an infrastructure that is first world and even tiny things like the ability for me to walk unharmed, at 10pm on a foggy, winter’s night, alone, with ipods in my ears is amazing. But the loss if horrible. Going forward I am banishing loss, to the extent that I can. My no diet philosophy has a new angle, it is the gaining of health. Out with loss! And if you are reading this and you are one of my peeps, far away, I still hold you with fullness 🙂

Onwards to a successful week for all of my buddies all around the world…

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I ran like the wind last night, well, like a gentle breeze – not a hurricane! Just twenty minutes on the treadmill, that normally doubles as a clothes-horse. In fact, I think the treadmill is so used to being a clothes-horse that it would be quite calm if I just draped myself over one of its handles and hung out there for a while…

But I digress, this is not about the treadmill. It is amazing how when you connect with your energy and push yourself, you do feel amazingly alive and how that translates to benefits hours later. I had to get up at 5:30am this morning to attend a breakfast launch in the city. I know that if I had not run last night, I would not have managed to get up half as cheerily as I did. As I was sitting on the train coming home tonight, I was musing about how when you put a different lens on a problem, you do see things differently and the solution does become quite different. It is about finding the right lens and then trusting your instincts, to try the solution that looks different to what previously made you successful. Let me explain, whenever I diet, I do lose weight, but there is an anxiety around any event that has food in it or actually just anxiety about whether I will get through the day sticking to the diet plan. And which event does not have food in it and what day does not have temptations? In diet-mode, I am always passing judgement about whether a day was “good” or “bad” based on what I did or did not eat! I don’t end up saying it was a good day if something fantastic happened at work, this would be paled into insignificance by the muffin I might have eaten in a meeting, rather than the major breakthrough that occurred in that meeting! Not a good way to live your life! So the new lens needs to focus differently…

So what was different today? Normally, prior to an event, my internal Gourmand and my food Nazi would have an enormous argument about what I will or will not eat. Today was different, subtle, but different. I went to breakfast with the view that I would eat only that which was healthy and I would be aware of my hunger and stop when I was satisfied. This subtle shift away from feeling deprived, was awesome. Suddenly I was free to eat and free to not eat. And the removal of the anxiety about sticking to “the plan” meant I did actually defuse the obsession with what I might eat and I actually ate sensibly, focussed on the event and not feeling like a failure because what has passed my lips did not perfectly fit into “the plan”.

Verdict for Tuesday – Food suddenly doesn’t feel as emotionally charged and the relief is palpable! I am actually not as hungry as I normally would be if I was on a diet as I am not focussing on food and therefore am eating less…go figure!

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I grew up in a tiny town in South Africa, where I hunted with lions…mmmmh….no, that’s not quite true.  I grew up in a tiny town in South Africa, where I ran with wolves. Actually, there are no wolves in South Africa.  I grew up in a tiny town in South Africa, where nothing really happened.  It gave me an appreciation for the minutae of life.  I have lived on three continents and now call Australia home.  I have been privileged to set foot on all six continents and work in roles that I loved and blossomed in.  I have an ordinary life, with an ordinary husband, an ordinary daughter, an ordinary dog, cat and three goldfish.  I have learned that nothing is ordinary and every day is actually extraordinary and the poetry of my ordinary life is pretty exceptional.  Well, to me, anyway!

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