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routine

Mindfulness

Drop the damn bananas

July 21, 2016

What if I just let go?
What if I dropped all the weight, right here, right now?
What if I managed to slip away?

Like the majority of my fellow estimated 152 million bloggers pounding the keys somewhere in the world right now, this particular platform is not my primary source of income. [I’ll pause here so you can recover from that shock. We good? OK.] Yes, I have an honest-to-goodness 9-to-5 job in the corporate world. You know, the one. Where women wear smart skirt suits with white tennis shoes and everyone keeps a carpal tunnel brace in their top drawer for days when it’s damp outside. This is just my side gig. My alter ego.

One of the perks of my big girl job is that I get to do a lot of writing and a lot of editing. One of my favorite people to work with is my main man Dr. Dave. You know that dance you do when engaging in a conversation with a hyper-intelligent human being … When you nod on the outside and say things like, “How interesting,” and “Huh. Really?” but inside your brain is like an Amazing Race contestant frantically trying to put the puzzle together? But then, like Steve drawing the final hint on Blue’s Clues (I will never acknowledge Joe), it’s all there. Bam! You get it. And it’s genius. Life-altering even. It’s the type of exchange that’s worth the work because the thought changes you. It expands and alters the makeup of your brain. That’s my entire relationship reading and listening to Dr. Dave. The guy has this gift for inspiring and shaking cores and soothing souls. Sometimes he takes a straight path to deliver his message, but often he invites you along on a series of unexpected U-turns and gravel paths before delivering you to the promise land. To the epiphany. Yeah … he’s one of those people.

Recently, Dr. Dave shared one of his favorite metaphors. It seems that some time ago, in a small village in India, there was an obnoxious monkey population. The primates were so numerous, in fact, the townspeople decided to round them all up and take them to a lovely little monkey farm in the country somewhere, where they would have a better life and live out the rest of their monkey days. To catch them, the people would place a bunch of bananas inside an upside-down bamboo cage with fairly narrow bars. The animals would approach the cage, see the fruit, reach in and grab the banana. With their hands clenched tightly around the fruit, the monkeys couldn’t remove their arm from the cage. The harder and longer they would try, the louder their screams would get. This attracted more curious monkeys who would repeat the same imprisoning process. And thus the animals were had.

Of course the monkeys could have escaped easily if they would have just let go of the fruit. If they’d just drop the damn banana they would be free to go swing with their posse through the mossy trees and throw poo like little jungle punks. But they just couldn’t. They were panicking. They were frozen with fear. They were reacting. They were trapped. Then Dr. Dave went on to define what constitutes a banana for us – that being the feelings or actions or situations in your life that elicit a strong mental or physical response. Probably detrimental. Likely toxic. Definitely negative.

Holding Onto Bananas

After reading Dr. Dave’s piece, I spent nearly my entire 3-mile run the next morning thinking about my bananas; The toxic things that I cling to and the response they trigger in me. The noxious notions that infiltrate my thoughts and ridiculous requests I place on myself.

I hold onto sugar.
Boo hoo, I know. But truly I’ve long battled some sweet, sticky food addiction demons. Growing up, treats and large meals were a mark of celebration. I, in turn, have carried this tradition on to my own family. Frozen yogurt, brownies, greasy gyros from our favorite place … it all adds up to a slippery equation of food + happy = reward. And who doesn’t want to be rewarded? Like, all the time. The problem is I’ve come to a place where those little white granules (perhaps the poop of angels, I hypothesize) now own me. They control me. They take me so high and then drop me on my head. But no matter how many times I tell myself – usually in the haze of a sugar-induced hangover – that I am done, I end up following the syrupy trail right back to the honey pot.

I hold onto perfection.
Real talk for a second. I started an entire blog based on this concept. Based on the pursuit of a perfect balance between all of the parts of myself that battle for time and attention. I want to see the world. I want to stop screaming at my daughters. I want to cook with ingredients I pluck from an organic raised garden bed. I want to kill it at work. I want to be perfect at this blog where I write about my pursuit of perfection. With my body, with my habits, with my profession, with my parenting, I hold onto these unrealistic expectations for myself so tightly that I don’t even know what a feeling of perfection would smell, taste, look or feel like at this point even if I somehow managed to reach it. Sometimes I think it’s just easier to keep looking past where we are rather than live contently in all the messy, dirty, imperfect bits of ourselves. Defining yourself as a work in progress is the ideal guise for an existence riddled with rough edges.

I hold onto fear.
This is a huge one for me. I’ve talked about my anxiety and I’ve talked about my struggles with parenting in this violent world here before, but truly, the terror I live with runs crazy-deep. I attribute at least some of this to the fact that I am a prisoner of push notifications. My job requires me to be online for the majority of the day. My phone, my laptop, my desktop, my television, whatever it is, there’s some horrifying news alert popping up on it. Flashes of events that point to the demise of character and kindness and sanity and love for humanity flood my newsfeed and thus, my mind. In one of my more recent social media-induced meltdowns, my brother (you remember Just Matt) told me to get a grip and remember they’re just leaving out the good stuff.

My thought of the day for you regarding the world we live in … You’re better off not watching the news. It will make you a happier person. Something negative happens and they beat it to death to keep you tuned in. Try shutting it off. The world is full of wonderful people, so many caring and selfless things happen on a daily basis, but that isn’t what anyone focuses on. All any of us can do is help one another and love one another and raise our kids that way and to not let a few bad people keep them from loving every minute of the short life we all get. The kids and I will sometimes pick up a bill in a restaurant for someone. They love it and you have to think that it makes that person’s heart happy and makes them want to pass that feeling along to someone else. Bad things have happened since man was created and always will, but at the end of the day people are good, that just isn’t news. The positives far outweigh the negatives on a daily basis, but just like the evening news, we tend to focus 28 minutes on all of the negative and just set aside the last 2 minutes to talk about how a stranger donated an organ for some child they don’t even know so they can live a happy normal life and love their friends and family. So shut off the crazy people on the news and focus on all the awesome people you are surrounded by on a daily basis, like me for starters.

– he wrote

And he’s right. I know he’s right. But then I go to sleep and have vivid dreams of nuclear attacks and running through crazed streets grasping my sobbing children and all the horrible things the dark parts of our brain push aside during the daylight hours. And I wake up drenched in sweat and succumb to the fear. How can I protect them? What would I do if …? Why is the world so broken? I feel helpless and small and scared to death.

I hold onto my routine.
Ask anyone who’s close to me and they will tell you I live and die by my meticulous schedule. They’ll also tell you it’s annoying AF. Almost any hour of the day I can tell you where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing with about 80 percent accuracy. Any deviation from this cadence requires additional planning to compensate appropriately. Any unplanned deviation has the potential to send me spiraling downward … smoking engine, towering flames, the whole scene. The thing is, it annoys me, too! I swear it does. But it’s a survival mechanism. Unfortunately, to conquer the Everest that is training for a half marathon, dressing and getting 3 children ready to go, working a full day, making dinner, doing baths, menu planning, meditating and getting a semi-decent amount of sleep, only, mind you, to wake up and do the whole damn thing over the next morning, requires a solid plan. Otherwise the wheels just fall right off the wagon. But there’s certainly a strong argument for a little more flexibility. A little less rushing along and a little more “in the moment”. But if I’m really honest, even when I’m cutting loose and playing along with the pull of the universe, I’m still calculating the time lost and required compensations in my head. Maybe that’s just being a mom. Maybe that’s just me as a mom. Maybe I’m a total psycho who needs drugs and liquor.

Free Bird

It’s brutal holding onto these bananas. They’re rotten. And honestly, it’s exhausting. So much of my energy is pumped into fueling these cyclical habits that positively drain me. So, what would happen if I just dropped them? If I let go and pulled my arm back out of the cage? Would I be free? Could escaping anxiety and shedding all that extra weight really be that simple? That obvious? Something I could have just done 5 years ago? Am I held by a trap I set out for myself? I don’t know …

If only bananas weren’t so sweet. You know how I like my sugar.

Mindfulness

In the name of my OODA loop

January 23, 2016

I stood paralyzed; spinach in one hand, almond milk in the other, a steam engine stalled at a bend in the track. The cups for my Ninja blender, the device I use every single morning to whip up a little smoothie action, were all suds-deep in the still-running dishwasher. A problem that should be a dot on the radar of my day was, in that moment, a hurricane coming ashore. Everyone kept moving with the momentum of the morning, while I stood still, unable to unravel the riddle of my shattered routine.

Have you heard of the OODA loop? The phrase refers to the decision cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act, developed by military strategist USAF Colonel John Boyd. Basically, it’s our reaction time, or the time that elapses between the onset of a stimulus and the onset of a response to that stimulus. We go through the process thousands of times a day. And I think my OODA loop is broken … or at least, on autopilot.

balance

A routine is a necessary evil, isn’t it? Each one of my weekdays is, give or take a tantrum, basically a revolving door of tasks, routes and actions. I can guess, within a few minutes, what I’ll be doing on any given hour Monday-Friday. I worked hard to make it that way. It was an intentional process. It feels vital to my sanity. But the predictability is so engrained in my nature, so damaging to the health of my OODA loop, that one obstacle sends me into a complete downward spiral, with smoke and flames and a sticky parachute. I mean, I can always rally. I can pull myself out of my assembly line mentality long enough to put out the fire in front of me, but then it’s right back to putting all the parts in place before the next task comes along.

Our security officer at work encouraged us to change our routine to throw off anyone dangerous who might be watching. A researcher presenting at a seminar on brain health recently told us you should vary your route to work, hobbies and schedule to strengthen the neural pathways in your brain. It seems everywhere I go, someone is saying, “Snap out of it, sister! Mix it up!” But the truth is, when I go rogue and burn the agenda defiantly, the whole day goes to pot. The wheels fall off the wagon. Shit gets crazy. I get crazy.

But the simple fact that on that particular morning with the cups I didn’t just stay in stride, grab my big blender and continue concocting my green juice, got me thinking about my sad, humdrum OODA loop. Most days, the only challenge might be the addition of a class at the gym, or an appointment after work. And in those cases the exorbitant amount of energy I put into reframing my cookie cutter schedule is so absurd my OODA loop turns frenzied and exhausts itself. There is no healthy happy-medium. No delight in the detours. And what kind of way is that to live life?

My world is full of well-worn trails and thin-soled shoes. And while I’ve come to rely on and relish the rhythm of my days, I know it isn’t always healthy. I know a last-minute request shouldn’t be cause for complete emotional upheaval, but I don’t know how to break free from my deep-rooted habits and be carefree about the curveballs. Did you know that the neural pathways in our brains that are tied to the habits we repeat over and over – the ones you can do without ever really arousing your OODA loop – are the widest of all the neural pathways? It’s like a path through the woods. The more people walk down it, the wider and more prominent it becomes, making it the natural place for our feet to follow as we trek along. The road that the signals for stimulus and response travel in our minds are the same. The more we light them up, the bigger they get. So every time I pick out my clothes the night before work, the wider that neural pathway gets. Each morning I drive to work, always the exact same route, that pathway expands and strengthens. And the widest neural pathways are the ones we start to take involuntarily. You can start new ones. And you can change the ones you have. There’s nothing but opportunity there.

trail

I went to a presenter today who spoke about mindfulness, and he talked a lot about being on autopilot. “I’d be in the shower and I’d start thinking about something else, and there are times I’m sure I got out of that shower with wet hair, but I never washed it,” he said. “I think you’ve done that, too.” He encouraged us to crack the window, breathe into our bodies and shut off the autopilot whenever possible.

So, I’m waging war against myself in the name of my bored, predictable, even lackadaisical OODA loop. I’m fighting to snap out of my snap reactions and judgements. To do things differently every now and then for the sake of feeling awake. To widen new pathways in my mind and to keep growing, learning and taking pauses drenched in wonder.

driving

How’s your OODA loop?