Understanding Hubris from the Inside in Everyday Ramblings

There is a house a few blocks away with a peace rose out front. I have been taking lovely, even sometimes stunning pictures of its various blooms over the years. The house is for sale by one of these buy old houses and churn them for profit places and this makes me sad, and hope that the new owners realize what they have.

This rose is near the fence at the other community garden that I walk by on the way back from mine. It is late here for roses now, but I took this Wednesday. I love the color, the buttery yellow in the early light.

There is an absence of things happening in my world right now. I wait every day for the email from the state health authority to see how we are doing in terms of Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Kes needs an ultrasound on her ankle and leg and will drive to a facility further away to get it today because her local clinics are overwhelmed. Ankle, driving, further, not making a lot of sense. Maybe she can talk Most Honorable into doing the driving.

We are all making accommodations in so many ways around the scourge of this virus. I have been de-caffeinating over this last week. I don’t drink coffee so my consumption involves, tea, mass quantities of diet soda and, of course, chocolate.

I have listened to a couple of good interviews with this Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke that specializes in addiction who has a new book just out called Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

Listening to her is helping me understand Charity a little better, even though I still don’t understand what happened there. But it is also helping me understand from a different perspective my relationship with food and soda.

There is so much to be gained (ha!) from the Intuitive Eating Community. I have been practicing and deeply absorbing the principles over the last year. I am at the weight that my body wants to be at. The weight I was at 21. The weight I was when I got married. The weight I was when the lovely man I married loved me wholly. He still cares for me out there in his much more traditional life that suits him, than I could not have made with him.

All this is good. Overall, I am healthy (my hip is still being a little problematic but is not getting worse and it is much better than what was going on with my back last year) and active and relatively stable (I am teaching stability this week, and it is fascinating, all the things that go into it) and a contributing member of my communities.

I realize though that the Intuitive Eating is not bringing me what I long for, which is a balanced relationship with food. Maybe I haven’t experienced it long enough, that is certainly a possibility. I am much happier, less stressed, less preoccupied, less rigid than I was even this time a year ago and I have been having a lot of fun eating things I enjoy (and even growing a few of them)!

Dr. Lembke says, do the thing there in front of you that needs to be done. Focus on that. This all sort of ties into me not being “traditional” enough to make a marriage that is functional and lasts.

Except maybe with cats. Sammy, the incredibly difficult cat, was my longest-term relationship. :) Mr. Finch came in a close second, and he was a most difficult cat as well considering that he was human.

Even Mr. Finch, who was a misogynist and a modelizer, came to realize in his bird’s eye observational skills that my body was the way it was not from lack of trying to make it “other” but because that is the way it is. The hand I was dealt, the package I came in.

One of the things I do appreciate about addicts is their humility. They (we, because there are so many of us with our own unhealthy attachments) fully understand on a fundamental level the cost of hubris.

It seems like we would be living in a more peaceful and nourishing world if our decision makers had that understanding of hubris.

As with my human and feline relationships, apparently, I need to chart my own path in my relationship to food, while drawing on the wisdom that is all about deep nourishment on all the levels.

Lockdown is a good place to start exploring that.

Last updated August 27, 2021