Filling in the Background I - Life's Lessons/'Food for Though'/Repeated Mistakes

I've mentioned feeling ill for a long time and recently better. I've mentioned a sojourn away from rawfoodism and recently back to it. I've mentioned Phil, my wonderful husband, and my relatively recent relocation to Alaska, with all the contrasts it offers my previous outlooks. But really, I'm just getting into my stride here and I've left way too many blanks.

I want to share of myself in a revelatory manner, but I want it to be both interesting and thought-provoking and especially to be helpful. I want these stories and musings to be metaphors that 'ferry,' into someone else's being, to make connections. And, for myself, I want to garner those connections and also to continue to unfold my life's purpose. The past couple of years have been a period of intense exploration for me. Much of this was fueled by lust for breadth of experience, and desire to deepen my connection with life and love, plus a salutary expansion away from years of black-and-white. But some of it has also been the result of my over-willingness to take on someone else's viewpoint at the expense of my own. This may have the philosophical value of substituting my 'haeresis' for someone else's to help me toward suspending judgment, but in practical terms it has not always allowed me to be my best and healthiest.

After all this exploration and also the dipping into other people's lenses for viewing the world, I feel like I am more ready than I ever have been to stop repeating mistakes, to listen to my own inner guidance, to recognize the choices in each moment that will allow me to be my best, and to be of service for the highest and best good.

It is an awkward feeling, to recognize that you have allowed yourself to repeat a mistake that you had made before. And then you vow 'never again,' you say you know, this time, that you don't need to go there. And then the wheel turns and some of the furniture gets moved and you don't notice the danger, and all of a sudden there you are again.

If I can avoid the trap of falling into black-and-white thinking again, I will feel like I have learned one of my life's lessons. But another one that I fervently want to fail to fall into again is the trap of taking on another person's views about food and attempting to apply it to myself. If I admire a person, I won't necessarily emulate what I admire in them simply by imitating their habits and fuel.

'Food for thought' for me here, since I'm so conscious of the metaphorical significance of these lessons and everything else, and since I do think about food so much: one of the things that I love about Phil is that generally he isn't 'black and white.' But he does have some strong ideas about how food affects us (that it does somewhat, but not fundamentally: that if you exercise enough, you can eat what you like) and those ideas do not work in my body. His belief system also includes getting the right diagnosis and the right drugs, and then being able to carry on exercising and eating whatever you like. It seems to work for him! It does not work for me. As much as I always intend to 'suspend judgment,' for practical purposes I have to act as my body and its beliefs and limitations dictate (and that's a whole other post-subject, the balance between knowing limitations and creating a reality that transcends them).

And for me, the most hopeful thing in this is that if I can own this, it becomes a small thing. I never asked anyone to change how they ate on my account. I tried to change on someone else's account, thinking it would be better for the relationship and more economical. Now that I accept that that was a mistake - and a mistake I'd made before, and move on, it needn't have much impact on our loving connection. (Tell me all the red flags that come up here!)