Living Deliberately

In the spirit of Thanksgiving...

This is a great period of evolution for me, or perhaps I am just more self-aware. My world view has been changing, my stress-level decreasing, my emotional and physical health improving. Things that were once mundane now give me reason to celebrate, i.e. making dinner or riding my bike to work. (Those things haven't changed. I have.)

One small change I've made has been a decision to savor everything I eat. No more mindless eating, only that which is mindful. The benefits of this seem to be fourfold (at least): I eat slower, I eat only when I'm truly hungry, I eat only foods I want to savor, and I enjoy the whole process. If only I didn't have to keep reminding myself...but I guess that makes me even more mindful!

Barbara Kingsolver writes in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that we as a nation lack a food culture. Now I am beginning to create my own, developing it with my favorite people. This blog will thus continue to follow my running life while scooping up a little from my eating life - a natural transition.

The words that keep arising in my consciousness are "living deliberately", but I couldn't remember where I'd heard them. Enter: Google. Ah ha! It's Thoreau (duh):

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. -- Walden; or, "Life in the Woods --Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"