Monday ramble

I ended my roundup with "Choose gratitude." Excerpts:

For many people, gratitude is difficult, because life is difficult. Even beyond deprivation and depression, there are many ordinary circumstances in which gratitude doesn’t come easily.

and

Beyond rotten circumstances, some people are just naturally more grateful than others. 

Admittedly, my circumstances are far from rotten, but even when they are, I'm generally naturally inclined toward gratitude. Except when I'm not, and when I'm not, I do try to force it, and usually it works. But even for someone like me, who knows how lucky I am, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, my heart's response to my mind is "yes I f*ing know you have a roof over your head and (good) food to eat and people who love you and great health... but dammit why not this thing?"

I've had a challenging couple of weeks, in the course of which I've grasped for gratitude. It has not eluded me--it never does--but I haven't been able to fully feel it. Maybe I overuse it, and it loses its power to uplift?

Did I tell you that I recently saw and really enjoyed "The Queen of Versailles"? There's a moment where one of the children, whom the mother adopted from a relative, talked about how, when she lived in poverty, she thought that having money would fix everything and she'd be happy everyday, but now that she lived wealth, it became the new normal, and she took it for granted.

I do my best to take nothing for granted, but I do get caught up in what's the current normal. I've been thinking about this as I tried to climb out of my rut: why isn't the gratitude working?

Last night, God (FSM, what have you) answered my question in a perfect way, by sending me after pecans. I help sell pecans for the local Smith club; the woman who runs the sale lives about 30 minutes from me, and a good 20 minutes of the drive to her place corresponds to the commute that I used to loathe. And like I said, I'm good at gratitude and perspective: when the Metro acts up, which it does increasingly, I think about how much better a bad day on Metro is to any day of what I used to drive. But lately, I had trouble feeling it. Well, last night, I was genuinely grateful for the reminder of how lucky I am not to go through that on a daily basis (and it wasn't even as bad as a rush-hour commute would be). As I stopped at every light, I thought, "how wonderful that I don't do this everyday, or even once a week, and how grateful I am for this reminder of how easy my commute is these days." I haven't even had to pick up the pecans from the organizer in a while, because she's often in my neck of the woods and drops them off, but this time, going down there served a purpose. And this morning, when Metro was late and it was cold, and I was anxious to get to work, all I could think was how blessed I was for this easy commute.

***
That was on the way back from pecans; on the way to pick them up, I made a detour to the outlets. I'd just been to a different set of outlets the night before, on the way back from a day trip to West Virginia, so I knew there wasn't much for me in most of my go-to stores. But I needed a pair of boots, and these outlets had more and better shoe stores.

I didn't find boots, but I found a gorgeous pair of faux-crocodile mauve pumps that I did not need at all. As I bought them, on sale for $25, I thought about how retail therapy isn't such a bad thing if you can afford it, just like eating a whole pint or half-gallon of ice cream in one sitting isn't a problem if you don't mind the consequences. Sometimes a band-aid solution to your pain hits the spot until you can really heal, and it's up to you to decide when the band-aid's help is worth the pain of ripping it off afterward.

I'm past the point where a single $25 expenditure has consequences, but I am my mother's child, and mom would point out that $25 here and there adds up. That is a true statement, but I would counter that giving too much thought to $25 here or there adds up more, and only you can be the arbiter of when it's worth it. I don't have a problem with compulsive spending or frivolous shopping.

Reverse the roles: mom would be contemplating the purchase of a pair of shoes. I'd say to her, "you don't have space for another pair of shoes in your house. That's the true cost." And I did think about that, and decided these were worth it.

I could afford the money and I could afford the space. In continuity with last week's ramble: I can afford to put away a half-gallon of (vegan) ice cream. But I don't want to. I have no desire whatsoever to eat even a bowl of ice cream; I wouldn't if you put one in front of me.

I don't eat emotionally anymore. Extraneous food is no longer comforting to me; it never was, but I once indulged as if it were. At some point, food went away as an issue, as something I had to fight.

I tell you this not to keep harping about how I lost weight (and more importantly, made it a non-issue); I mean, yes, I am harping on my success story. On the fact that I overcame this thing I struggled with for years, and it is amazing. I harp because I still struggle with Things, and I look for lessons from overcoming this other thing. Here are some:

One: establishing good habits whether or not they yield instant results, is what gets you sustainable results in the long-run.

Two: Mindfulness. It's the only way you can break the habit of choosing the cheap high or not-even-high at the expense of your goal.

Three: Baby steps. Just because you're not there yet, doesn't mean you're not heading in the right direction.

Three-and-a-half: Forgive yourself your failures and admit that you want what you want and that you feel how you feel.

Four: Proceed in alignment with your values. No promise of weight loss, no matter how I wanted it, would have pushed me to paleo; I chose vegan once I thought I could do it because I believed in it.

Four-and-a-half: Love yourself and fall back on your personal integrity.

Five: Revel in your success when you get there.