Looking back; looking forward

Christmas Day is, in some ways, the last day of the old year. Yes, there is another week left of the year, but it is a fallow time in which we finish up the last bits of the dying year and begin to look at and plan for the coming year. Some say that there is no good reason for this divide, that one day is just the same as another. I don’t think that’s true. Our lives are marked out by meetings and partings, by ritual and expectation, and I think the new year is one of those marks by which we measure and in which we can find inspiration.

Over the last few days, I’ve found myself reflecting. The last year was on the whole successful for me. I lost 50 pounds, biked over 2000 miles, and began taking the first steps toward running right at the end of the year. I made a lot of delicious bread and other food, I spent quality time with family and friends, and I did some good fundraising for an excellent cause.

There were some parts of the year that weren’t as successful. There were people I love with whom I didn’t get spend nearly enough time. I spent way too much time on the computer and didn’t read nearly enough books. I let my yard and garden run to wild. I didn’t get a single quilt or piece of jewelry made. I barely practiced juggling, or spinning poi, both skills I want to learn/improve. I feel like I handled the basics but let a lot of time slip by me around the edges that could have been put to much more fruitful use.

So my biggest resolution for the coming year is to take back my life from the computer. It’s a wonderful tool, and I don’t intend to abandon social networking and all the support it’s given me. The reality, however, is that I haven’t even been using this tool very well. I’ve barely journaled at all, one of the things I seriously regret. I mostly sit refreshing Facebook and Spark People and not actually accomplishing much. There are too many evening hours spent just frittering away my time, time I could be making something creative and beautiful, or tending to my garden, or practicing, or reading a book.

I’ve known this was an issue for a while, and I’ve tried to change it without much success. This time I need to take it more seriously. I need to set a timer to limit my social networking, and when it goes off I need to get off the computer and on to something more productive. I’m going to have to experiment a bit with determining how much time I should spend online.

And then I have to get offline. My life doesn’t need to be lived electronically. I have better things to do with it.

New Year’s Resolutions: Dreadful Things!

It’s that time of year when everyone gets ready to start a fresh new year by setting themselves up for failure: “I’m not going to eat sweets” or “I’m going to work out for two hours every single day” or “I’m not going to watch TV anymore.” Or “I’m going to keep my house spotless every single day!”

If you are like most New Year’s resolvers, you will violate your resolution within a week – quite possibly on New Year’s Day itself. And then a little voice in the back of your head will be saying, “You were a loser from the very beginning of 2012.” And at the end of 2012, when people are looking back and asking if anyone kept their resolutions, that little voice will be saying, “No, you were a loser!”

And we wonder why we don’t feel good about ourselves.

Two years ago I decided I was done with subtractive resolutions, the kind of things that are all about sacrifice. Instead, I decided that I would make New Year’s Goals, positive, definitive actions that, when accomplished, I could point at and say, “yup, I did that!” My first goal was to learn to juggle, and by the end of the year, I had learned to juggle three balls. I was ecstatic. Last year I resolved to learn to bake sourdough bread, and we have lovely bread all the time now.

Making a goal of something you want to learn is so much more positive than a resolution of self-prohibition that you have to police all year. It’s happy-making!

My goal this year is to participate in Ohio’s Pedal to the Point bike ride to benefit MS research. There is definitely a huge fitness component in getting ready for that ride, but it has a definitive goal, and as we are friends with people who are heavily invoved, a big fun component as well.

What’s your goal for the coming year?

Have a lovely, gracious Christmas

Even if you don’t celebrate it. In which case, have a lovely, gracious day anyway.

Though I am not of the Christian persuasion, I still love this day for the celebration of family and friends that it is. A long history of winter feasts predates Christmas by millennia. It was a time to welcome back the return of the sun, the lengthening of days that signified that a new spring would be coming, and with it life renewed.

Is it any wonder that the early church chose this holiday as the perfect place to celebrate the birth of their god? The coming of the sun/son already had an established history from which to work. Bless those Romans, they were the best at vacuuming up local culture and using it to their advantage.

For me, the celebration of Christmas is a wonderful time to enjoy family and reach out to those less fortunate. Looking upon the most classic of Christmas stories, Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol.” one can see that, while there is much talk of kindness and generosity, there is no real talk about Jesus. It’s not a Christian story; it’s a human story. A tale of how our humanity is impacted by our interaction with the world.

For me, today will be a day of family and friends, of feasting and laughter. The fruited bread is rising, the fire is roaring, and a leisurely morning will soon give way to excited children and chattering adults. We will deep-fry the turkey that’s currently brining, cook the ham and the rolls and the potatoes. Everyone will come to the table to feast.

So whether you are feasting with family, taking in a day of movies and Chinese food, or just hanging out, I wish you the best of the day, and a happy final week of 2011.

Graciousness abroad

We are spending the holidays with my mother-in-law, who is probably the most awesome mother-in-law anyone ever had. We got here on Wednesday evening, and yesterday went shopping for the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day feasts that we will be cooking here.

I’ve offered to bake bread and rolls, and to help with the cooking, so I brought recipes with me, and between her grocery list and my additions, our list was three pages long. And of course as you walk through the store you find all those things you forgot to include on the list. By the time we made the final turn toward the checkout stands, our cart looked like the Grinch’s sleigh just before he took it up Mt. Crumpet to dump it.

And we still had to go out to dinner last night.

Cooking in someone else’s kitchen is always a bit of a challenge. It helps that my mother-in-law has a wonderful kitchen, and that she is very flexible and laid back about others taking it over. I don’t know that I could manage to be that casual about sharing my kitchen.

But there are definitely those moments when getting ready to cook in someone else’s kitchen makes one feel like a bit of a douche. Including making the grocery list and determining if there are compatible items in the kitchen. Like flour. She has flour. It’s not the right flour. She doesn’t really need more flour, but we are buying flour anyway because I will insist on using King Arthur Flour.

Or the sugar cookies. She wanted to buy premade dough. Premade dough is nasty. I don’t want to make sugar cookies with premade dough.

Hey, there’s going to be lots of extra flour. I can volunteer to make the sugar cookie dough!

Triumphant in that, I let the purchase of premade frosting, and Ferrett’s glee over some terrifying-looking decorating gel, go. And the purchase of some Uncle Ben’s microwaveable rice mix as a side for Christmas Eve dinner as well.

Roasted fresh brussel sprouts and carrots will be side-buy-side with canned sweet corn. I won the “no frozen broccoli” battle, so letting the corn go seemed the right thing to do.

Gracious living isn’t impossible when visiting others, but it does require flexibility and a sense of humor. I will keep my wincing at the jello creation to a minimum, and focus on the sharing of love of family and friends.

Eating graciously

I just read a blog entry discussing the author’s plan for Christmas dinner. Her family traditionally makes prime rib and rich side dishes for that special meal, but because she has lost weight and doesn’t want to regain, she is bringing her own food instead of partaking in the family meal. She expects resistance, and is dreading the ordeal.

She then goes on to describe a meal that would be considered deprivation by any standards: steamed turkey breast (!) steamed vegetables, and half an apple with cinnamon and 6 raisins for dessert. Her planned Christmas dinner has fewer than 400 calories.

And sounds like bad hospital food.

Now, I have more than a few pounds of extra padding. I have struggled with weight my entire life, and weight has pretty much won the battle. But I really wanted to respond that I’d rather be fat than to have to eat like that.

Food is more than just fuel for our bodies. It’s an integral part of our social structure, and sharing meals is a bonding experience that carries tradition into our times together and memories out of those times. A good meal, particularly a festive meal shared with family or friends (or both), feeds more than just our stomachs: it is pleasing to the eye, pleasing to the sense of smell, tactile, and even pleasing to the sense of hearing as conversation and laughter fill the room. A shared meal should fulfill all five senses.

We have gotten out of the habit of lingering at table, and food  tends to be bolted down in front of the TV or the computer–I’m just as guilty as anyone else about this most of the time. It’s partially because of this that the disconnect between fueling our systems and the true nourishment of dining has occurred. Even though dining out used to be considered a lingering experience, some fine restaurants are now making reservations for three separate seatings per table per evening, because they know that they can hustle diners in and out without the customers feeling rushed; they are so used to eating on a fast food schedule now that they don’t even notice. Much of the time, they barely notice what they are eating.

There is some pushback going on in response to this speed-eating insanity. Restaurants like San Francisco’s Saison are decreasing the number of tables and taking reservations for only one seating in an evening, with the expectation that diners will linger, talking and eating small portions of numerous courses over several hours. It’s the kind of dining experience that was once common, and now is a sort of novelty.

How sad for us all. Where we used to spend time with family and friends, we now rush off to watch TV or play on the internet.  Where we used to make memories of shared times – some good, some bad, some funny, some tragic – we zap something in the microwave and stuff forgettable food into our mouths. And wonder why we feel unfulfilled.

The holidays are often all we have left of those shared traditions. A group of people coming together to prepare and share a meal has a certain sacred, ritual nature to it. That nature doesn’t belong to any one faith or creed; it doesn’t depend on believing in anything – except the value of each other as human beings.

Yeah, lots of us suffer from difficult relationships with our families. Yeah, there can be division of labor issues with who does the cooking and cleaning up. But these issues don’t detract from the bedrock nature of sharing both food and ourselves. Nurture is not just about providing the proper number of kcals and nutrients to ensure our internal combustion engines run at optimal efficiency. It’s about feeding our minds and our souls as well, if not with the family of your birth, then with the family of your choosing: friends and loved ones.

And I come back to the idea of that blogger surrounded by lovingly-made food, eating her plain, white dinner while regarding the dishes around her as a sort of enemy, rejecting the love and caring that went into them in favor of food she’s prepared only for herself, and brought only for her own benefit. Will she feel smug and superior as she eats her spartan meal? Will she feel resentment? Will her family look at her plate with ridicule, guilt, hurt feelings that she has rejected their traditions in favor of something so meager? What will or won’t be said because of her choices? What opportunities will be lost?

I’m not saying that the notions of healthy eating should be tossed to the winds and people should stuff themselves sick just because it’s Christmas. But imagine that instead of setting herself apart from family ritual, she’d brought a big green salad and some roasted brussel sprouts to share? That instead of turning her nose up at the prime rib, she’d asked to a sliver of a slice? That instead of closing herself inward to the food-is-fuel mentality, she’d embraced the idea of dining-is-sharing? For her, Christmas dinner is an ordeal to be overcome, instead of a communion of family. And it doesn’t have to be.

Part of living graciously is dying graciously

First of all, let me reassure you all that I am not (to my knowledge) dying of anything at this time. I just had a physical and a bunch of tests and they all came back clean, so rest assured that I’m not writing this in anticipation of pending departure.

I am writing it because of an article I recently read about how doctors die, and how very often they make different, truly informed choices about their end-of-life care. That many times doctors will choose not to undergo invasive, painful treatment that has small hope of success and will, instead, choose to live out the remainder of their lives in quiet dignity, enjoying the time that they have remaining with their family and friends.

What a pity that more people aren’t counseled toward that option. Even more, what a pity that the families of the terminally ill aren’t supported in helping their relative make a choice that will allow them to retain their dignity and reach the end of their lives in a manner that is loving and positive.

Modern medicine has made amazing strides, and certainly I’m not scoffing at the notion of continued research toward effective treatment and cure of diseases like cancer. And I’m not saying that people who hear the “C” word should immediately update their will, make their funeral arrangements, and lay out their burial clothes. There are many cases where treatment is worth trying, and each patient should be fully informed of the treatment options and the likely prognosis.

But there comes a point when treatment is less about the patient’s quality of life and more about the doctors making certain that they are safe from accusations of malpractice. When doctors offer patients treatments that they wouldn’t accept themselves and to which they wouldn’t subject their own family members. And it’s hard for them to say, “you should consider stopping” because there is that one-in-a-fifty patient who does respond to this particular therapy, who does get better. No one can tell for certain who will be the lucky one who grabs the brass ring, so how can one counsel a patient that the horrible side effects of this particular treatment are not worth the small chance of winning the treatment lottery?

We want medicine to be better than it is. We want medicine to be miraculous in its ability to save us. We live in a world where we have overcome most of the diseases that used to kill us in childhood, where a minor wound doesn’t present a serious risk of fatal infection, where a fever is unlikely to run out of control and damage our brains.

But we all still die. We don’t do it with the regularity of the past–discounting accidents, we don’t die in our youth or young adulthood very often–and we don’t do it in our homes, among our own relatives, at least not usually. Thanks to the hospice movement, more of us are dying at home, but frequently not until our dignity has been shattered into a billion pieces and hospice is a method of trying to scrape back together some of that dignity and make some peace with the pain and anguish that would otherwise be our last memory of our loved one.

This is still not a very gracious way of reaching the end of our lives.

I hope it’s a very long time before I have to make these kinds of decisions, for myself or for anyone else. I hope, really, that when death comes it is swift and painless. But if these decisions become ones that I have to make, I hope that I will make wise ones. Almost a quarter of medical expenditures in this country are made in the last year of life, and most of those expenditures have little impact on the final outcome–save to make that last year of life a sad, painful, miserable journey that leaves the grieving family with painful final memories.