Don’t cook when you’re hungry
So many of us are feeling hungry these days. As so many people, in so many places, operate from a space of figurative and literal hunger, the sparkle and the bubble of too many people’s lives seems to just be going flat. And, for someone who only drinks carbonated water, I don’t do well with flat.
This week I had to take a reflective moment to adhere to a piece of advice a friend recently shared with me. “ Gina, never cook when you’re hungry. “ Apparently this is an old saying. I had never heard before, but, did it make sense. Deciding to act on this profoundly simple philosophical advice — don’t cook when your hungry– I decided to stop cooking and start eating. For me, as a writer, that meant doing something radical…I emptied my schedule for two weeks, canceled all my meetings and decided I was going to spend twelve days filling myself up with re-reading and editing of my book. The act of liberating my schedule of transactional activities to spend my days immersed in a creative fulfilling process was the equivalent of me sitting down and deciding I was only going to eat health food smothered in chocolate for two weeks. Which means the experience was heaven. Absolute, and purposeful indulgence.
Having freed myself up from corporate America for about a month now I discovered that I had been in what I call “transactional mode.” Which is never good. Operating in transactional mode is when you find yourself spending all your time: checking email, sending email, playing phone tag, paying bills, buying products, selling services, running errands and cleaning up your inbox – activities which require little to no brain power. Everything you want to do, everything you want to be — everything that you are — gets set aside.
