Generosity

The Week of Yes

March 15, 2013

It started with a pair of socks. I needed a pair of socks to ride in, and I found some cute ones at a tack store where I was having a repair done. As with any specialized item, since the socks were “for riding” they cost more than an equivalent pair of plain socks. I weighed my options: buy the slightly-more-expensive-but-cute socks that are exactly the right length and thickness for riding or save money, wait for a sale, buy another pair of socks that will do but are not quite right. You’d think that would be an easy decision, wouldn’t you? It was when I was standing there holding the socks and debating with myself about buying them that I realized just how stingy I can be with myself.

I’ve been thinking about this concept for quite some time. Where is the line between common sense frugality and stinginess? Part of the way I think comes from how I grew up and most of my young adulthood. For a long time, I did not have money for anything except true necessities. I remember carrying a calculator to the grocery store when I was first married; once I hit a certain amount, items were returned to the shelf. There simply was no extra money in the budget.

But it’s not just money but time that I’m stingy with. I’ve begun to feel that if I’m not working—either for pay or for the good of the family—I’m wasting time. Add these beliefs to my naturally cautious and shy nature and you have a recipe for a narrow, joyless life and a lot of guilt. I seem to take a perverse pleasure in denying myself things I want, whether it’s a pair of socks or a half hour to read *gasp* right in the middle of the day.

I don’t want to live like that. I want to be more generous, loving and kind to myself. I believe that will make me happier as well as help me be more generous and loving to others. So I came up with the concept of “a week of yes”—a week where I followed my impulses, indulged my desires and generally loosened up on myself. Three times I’ve set out to have a “week of yes”—and three times I’ve started and stopped.  I can’t seem to sustain the concept of saying yes for more than a day or two. It’s hard! It’s scary. It requires some serious attention and listening to myself.

Why don’t I say yes? Like too many things, it comes down to fear: What if I say yes and something bad happens? What would other people think? What options will I close off if I say yes? I’m a little afraid of what I’ll get myself into by saying yes. I definitely don’t want a life that is overloaded with too many activities and I don’t want yes to be indulgence for indulgence’s sake.

To make things more confusing, sometimes saying no is really saying yes! Saying no to lots of yummy-but-bad-for-me foods is really saying yes to my bigger goals of being leaner and healthier. (However, saying no to all delicious foods can lead to binge eating. Let’s not get too carried away here.) Saying no to an $80 purse I don’t need and am not in love with means saying yes to keeping that $80 for something else. (Here, a friend’s motto, “If it’s not an absolute yes, it’s a no” comes in handy.)

Instead of a week of yes, I’m slowly and gradually bringing yes into my life in small ways. To start, I’ve come up with these basic guidelines. I will say yes if:
    • It costs less than $10.
    • It’s something I’ve been wanting/wanting to do for a long time.
    • It furthers my larger and most important goals: good health, loving relationships, fulfilling work.
    • It’s an unexpected chance that might not come again.

And yes, I bought the socks.

The socks that started it all.
Do you think you’re generous with yourself? What do you want to say yes to?

Field Trip Friday: Le Mouton Noir

March 12, 2013


Are you ready for another installment of Field Trip Friday? This time, our wanderings took us to Le Mouton Noir (“the black sheep”) Bakehouse, because sometimes you just need to visit a gourmet bakery. Partner-in-adventure Laure and I made the trek to downtown Tampa to have lunch at this little place I’d heard about through the newspaper.


While our day was fun, we had a bit more adventure than we planned, thanks to my own inattention to detail. My first mistake was to copy only the rights and lefts of the Google Maps directions without the distances between points, and my second mistake was assuming I knew where the place was and walking confidently off in that direction after we’d parked. It was after we’d walked several l-o-o-n-g blocks and the street numbers were going the wrong direction that I remembered a bit about cross streets and Laure pulled out her phone to locate it. Yup, we’d walked in the opposite direction.

We were lucky it was a gorgeous, cool-but-sunny day and the extra walking made us feel that we could indulge, perhaps, in a pastry as well as lunch. (What better way to celebrate 20 extra minutes of walking than by inhaling 800 calories of sweet and sinful delight?)

By the time we reached the bakery, which we had actually driven past on our way to the parking garage, we were more than ready for lunch.

What I ate:

Insalata caprese sandwich
Our reward for the extra walking:

German chocolate cake
Lunch was delicious and worth the drive and walk. Laure sketched hers (she writes about it here) and I took pictures. Perhaps a sketch will appear in my sketchbook, but probably not, because I still haven’t finished the sketches from Sunken Gardens (but I promise I will and I’ll share them here)! We’ll probably go back at some future date—we haven’t tried the chocolate croissants, after all.

The moral of this Field Trip Friday is: when exploring new places, go with the flow and don’t get too upset if things don’t go quite as planned. Oh, and be sure to reward yourself with cake. Definitely, cake should be involved.

Have you taken a field trip lately?

Eating

Happy Little Things: Flavored Almonds

March 08, 2013


Eating: one of life’s great simple pleasures, but one that can quickly get me into trouble. In my quest for tasty-yet-mostly-healthy snacks, I’ve discovered the joy of flavored almonds. I started off with Blue Diamond butter toffee flavor, and…yum! Slightly sweet, but still mostly healthy. Next, a friend introduced me to the toasted coconut flavor, also tasty and just slightly sweet. And then, well, another friend warned told me about the salt ’n vinegar flavor, which is now my favorite. The only downside is that you have to be careful how many of these you eat, because one ounce weighs in at around 170 calories—no slugging down handfuls and expecting to retain (or regain) one’s svelte figure. 

Sure, plain almonds might be a bit healthier, and I do eat and enjoy them also—but when I want to have something that feels like a treat without totally derailing my health goals, I reach for one of these yummy flavors. They make me happy. (And yes, I do see that “artificially flavored” on the label of the salt ’n vinegar flavor—I admit they’re not perfect…but neither am I.)

What is your favorite healthy snack?

*I received no compensation for this completely unsolicited mention of Blue Diamond almonds.

Mailboxes

Waiting for News From Spring

March 06, 2013

Photo courtesy rnhyppy

When spring finally arrives, it can be fun to see what winter left behind, and Jeffrey Harrison of Massachusetts is doing just that in this amusing poem. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Mailboxes in Late Winter

It’s a motley lot. A few still stand
at attention like sentries at the ends
of their driveways, but more lean
askance as if they’d just received a blow
to the head, and in fact they’ve received
many, all winter, from jets of wet snow
shooting off the curved, tapered blade
of the plow. Some look wobbly, cocked
at oddball angles or slumping forlornly
on precariously listing posts. One box
bows steeply forward, as if in disgrace, its door
lolling sideways, unhinged. Others are dented,
battered, streaked with rust, bandaged in duct tape,
crisscrossed with clothesline or bungee cords.
A few lie abashed in remnants of the very snow
that knocked them from their perches.
Another is wedged in the crook of a tree
like a birdhouse, its post shattered nearby.
I almost feel sorry for them, worn out
by the long winter, off-kilter, not knowing
what hit them, trying to hold themselves
together, as they wait for news from spring.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2012 by Jeffrey Harrison, whose most recent book of poems is Incomplete Knowledge, Four Way Books, 2006. Poem reprinted from Southwest Review, Vol. 97, no. 1, 2012, by permission of Jeffrey Harrison and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.