September 2016 - My Soul is Scottish

It’s time to follow the clues

There’s a great series on Netflix called ‘Chef’s Table.’ Each episode features a chef who has reached the pinnacle of chef-hood, if that’s a word.

While the food is epic & the artistry something to behold, it’s the common theme of memory that I’ve found interesting. Each chef has memories of childhood foods, family and a place that anchored their path in food. They’re recreating the memory of happier times while constantly moving forward towards the edge of creativity by reinventing themselves in the present.

Each one has stood on the edge of failure, questioning whether they wanted to keep following their dreams despite the uncertainty of success or walking away from the dream in order to stay safe.

Every. Single. One. Jumped. They didn’t stand on the shoreline watching their dreams sail away. Not everyone wants to be a Michelin chef. We’re not all dreaming of being the best of the best. Many of us are trying to find ‘permission’ to follow modest dreams.

Maybe the answer is lying behind us, buried somewhere in the memories of an easier time.

Writing and music were my anchors as a child. Those were the things that brought order and calm to the chaos of a broken family. Happier family times were anchored around meals. My grandmothers couldn’t have been more different. My paternal grandmother was Welsh and had no clue how to cook basic dishes but she made sublime Cornish pasties, sausage rolls, crumpets and minestrone soup. Ironic given that Cornish pasties are an art form in themselves yet cooking cabbage was a challenge for her. My father’s standing joke is that he didn’t know cabbage was green until he met my mother.

My maternal grandmother cooked in the traditional South African farm-style way. She had crazy baking skills and could cook anything from offal to venison to Sunday roasts, and all the random bits in between. She was the master of comfort food. Christmas fruit cakes, plum pudding, jams, preserves and rhubarb crumble.

I miss those foods and while I won’t ever have kids or grandchildren to pass those down to, those meals can stay part of the tapestry of my life in the present. So what if they don’t make it to the next generation? They can still live on in mine. Maybe somewhere between the kitchen and my computer is a creative answer to the eternal question of ‘what should I be doing with my life?’

I’ve had many homes in my life and if I take the best flavours from each place, it’s a unique tapestry fit for a gypsy soul. South Africa, England, USA. Writing. Cooking. Creativity. Photography. 4 art forms that are vastly different yet when combined create something new.

This could be the recipe for balance that addresses the first item on my To Do list: Change of career. Changing a job is simple. Changing a life path is a completely different project altogether.

Operation-Unclutter has commenced

My 3 part To Do list has been a work in progress lately. While it was listed as #3 on my list, it’s certainly the most important one for me right now: restoring balance and health.

Earlier this week I had another one of my bathtub epiphanies when I considered an old saying ‘As within, so without. As above, so below.’ This is one of the seven principal of Hermes Trismegistus.

I guess it’s similar to the principal of what you think, you become. What goes on in your head manifests in the details of your life. Well, lately my head has been complete chaos with my carefully laid plans being shot to pieces; this has definitely shown up in the details of my life. Everything around me feels cluttered. My body is off the reservation with no note on when it’s expected back. No matter how much I clear away the clutter, it comes back and brings all its buddies with it. It has felt like the clutter is just oozing out the walls while I sleep.

If I want to bring order to my life, I need to restore order within. So that has been the work-in-progress over the past few days. It means looking for wisdom in those who have done this before. Why reinvent the wheel when there are so many others who’ve already figured it out? An article I read recently suggested moving books out of the bedroom because the energy in words keeps your brain active, making it harder to sleep.

While that sounds like New Age malarky to many, I figured why not? So the bookshelf got moved to the living room. I slept like the dead the night I did that and every night since.

Cooking needs to be part of the road to balance for me. I love food and I need to find a way to include it in my life in a way that benefits rather than harms me. That means the kitchen needs to be a haven for me, not a war on clutter. I have a tiny kitchen but a LOT of cooking stuff and all the spices to go with that.

A trip to IKEA for spice bottles, office supplies, a label maker, hanging baskets and a bigger bookshelf solved pretty much every kitchen storage issue I had. The bigger bookshelf meant I could put all my regular books in one place. That freed up the little bookshelf in front of my kitchen to be used for all the recipe books stashed in the kitchen cupboard. Freeing up an extra cupboard in the kitchen means clutter on the counters finally found a new home out of sight.

All my recipe books and a shelf at the front door for my shoes. That way I don't trek dirt over my carpets. — All my recipe books and a shelf at the front door for my shoes. That way I don’t trek dirt over my carpets.

Getting hanging baskets that fit onto my pantry shelves doubled up the pantry space, making it look tidier instead of disorganised clutter. Everything is now neatly grouped, stacked and easily accessible. I even made space for a new cast iron Dutch oven for stove to oven cooking.

Finally! Everything grouped together instead of shoved wherever there was space!

For less than $100 I have doubled my kitchen storage and restored order in a small space. Not to mention my living room looks more pulled together and the turquoise bookshelf goes really well with the sand-coloured sofa. I’ve always loved a beach/ocean colour scheme of blues, creams and browns. There might not be an ocean within 800 miles of this place but I can have the colour scheme!

Living room: After. Very chuffed I managed to assemble the shelf unsupervised!

I’ve lived in this apartment for almost 2 years and I’ve always treated it as a temporary stopping point. I’ve never put effort into making it a haven for myself and then wondered why I never felt home here. There’s no way of knowing if I’ll ever get back to Scotland; I haven’t given up. In the meantime I am here so it’s time I ‘lived’ here.

To Do List: Part 3

I read a quote a while back to the effect of ‘if you have more than 3 priorities, then you don’t have any.’ Legit. So health & well-being are item 3 on the list of shit to take care of.

Current situation is 17 lbs. to lose and zero motivation to get it done.

Tools available:

Eating plans from a holistic nutritionist – I have the info, I just need to pull my finger out my arse and follow her advice! Especially given that I’ve paid for it.

4 miles of walking a day as part of my commute so I am exercising to some extent.

Self-inflicted roadblocks:

Lack of willpower to follow an eating plan. I’m easily distracted.

Falling into old habits instead of making new ones.

Allowing myself to wallow in my misery instead of going outside and walking off the stress of a crappy day.

Turning to food/alcohol when I have a bad day.

Constantly telling myself that ‘I’ll eat better tomorrow so it’s OK if I eat crap today.’ Tomorrow hasn’t come yet.

Working through lunch and buying food downtown instead of prioritizing my sanity and taking a break away from my desk.

Not effectively managing my stress levels at work so I’m not getting restful sleep. This leaves me constantly tired, which means coffee.

Buying healthy food only to waste it by not eating it, instead wasting money on buying food at work.

Not planning my meals in advance and eating on the go.

God, I’m a mess.

Things I would do if I had balls and willpower:

Yoga. Always wanted to try it, never had the balls because ugg…. I’d have to meet people, be a beginner and have no idea what I’m doing. That terrifies me.

Cut out meat/alcohol/sugar/bread. Sugar has a tight leash on my willpower. The rest I can live without if I put a modicum of effort into trying.

Cut out coffee. Yep, just as soon as I start getting enough sleep.

Walk every day. Meh, Netflix on the sofa is easier.

Use all the superfoods and spices that apparently fix everything. Lack of imagination and being too tired to make the effort.

Meditate every day. I can keep this up for like a week, tops. Then I’m off the wagon again, doing something useless like Facebook.

I have a week off work coming up so time to pull myself together and start working on this list. Whether I do or don’t, the time will pass anyway.

If any of you have some useful tips on how to tackle willpower issues, that would be great! In the meantime, I have a huge stack of recipe books taking up an entire cupboard in the kitchen, so there’s no excuse for having no imagination on what to cook for dinner.

To Do List: Part 2

Relocation is another goal on the TO DO list and it’s time for that to go under the microscope to see what’s fueling the need to move.

The weather is right up there, probably taking the top 3 spots of reasons why! Humans aren’t meant to function at -40. Or 100F for that matter. How about a nice, middle of the road 50 – 80F? Shoveling is the bane of my existence and commuting in a blizzard feels a bit like having razor blades taped to the inside of your eyelids.

Medical expenses are ridiculous, not to mention the cost of living in Illinois.

I hate big cities. The honking. Yelling. Road rage. Pedestrians. Cabs. General mayhem. Constant bloody noise!

Would the weather be doable if I wasn’t commuting 2 hours a day, rain or shine? Maybe. I’ve never not had to commute since living here so currently I have no frame of reference for what not commuting would look like.

How about finding a job in the burbs instead of the city? That would probably make a huge difference to commuting, not to mention the cost savings of not taking the train twice a day.

Cost of living will be the same if I stay in IL, as will medical expenses if I stay in the US. To change either of those, I’d need to relocate out of state or out of the country and we’ve already had a huge NO on the out of the country option. For now. I’m not conceding defeat on that point just yet. So it takes me another year to get it done. Fine. The time will pass anyway.

Changing the weather will mean getting out of IL, plain and simple.

An immediate solution would be finding a job out of the city and removing my commute/big city irritations out of the equation then reassessing before moving out of state lock, stock and barrel.

Relocating isn’t a cheap hobby so if I can still pull off a move to Scotland, then I won’t waste money relocating stateside. If, heaven forbid, a year from now Scotland is still a no, then I’ll have a doable Location B picked out with a pile of research to back it up.

Next!

To Do List: Part 1

Ramblings incoming:

What you think, you become. Or so they say. For close on 10 months, my all-consuming thoughts have been of going home and yet, here I sit with a rejection on the visa that would take me there.

REJECTED. I can’t go home.

It’s difficult to wrap my head around it right now; I’m still in the denial phase of this train wreck. Of all the eventualities I’d planned for, NO was not one of them. It’s pointless pretending I’m anything less than devastated.

The logical thing is to regroup and come up with a Plan B to move my focus onto goals I can achieve right now. Narrowing down the list of goals isn’t too difficult; finding the motivation to do anything about them is proving to be more than a little challenging.

Top of the list of stuff to fix is my career. After 19 years in finance, I think it’s safe to say I’m overdue for a change. The question is: is the drive to change it greater than the fear preventing me from doing it? To date the answer has been no; so I’ve stayed, despite it crushing my spirit in daily installments. The time has come to look at that question very deeply and tally up the cost of NO.

Being a profit minion will always overrule any right I have to my own life and every time I sit down in my cube, I tacitly choose this reality. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that this is happening to me. It happens because I choose it. I get angry, frustrated and bitter and yet every day I put on my collar and lead myself to purgatory, all the while complaining about it.

Why do we do that? In varying degrees, we do this every day. That has been the cost of NO.

What would be the price of YES?

Starting a new job, not knowing if I’ll be any good. Ok… how many times have I done that in my life and survived without the world imploding in on itself? 9.

Meeting new people and worrying about not fitting in. There have been countless times of meeting new people, whether it was at school, college, jobs, new cities, social gatherings, etc. How many times have I not fit in? A few but for the most part, it turned out ok in the end. Uncomfortable, but not impossible.

Not having experience in a new industry/career. Yeah, welcome to every.single.job I’ve ever had. I’ve arrived knowing nothing, learned how to do it and then got good at it.

Uncertainty. Yep, that will be par for the course when changing careers but then again, I’ve lived in 3 countries, a few cities, had multiple jobs, tried my hand at sports and hobbies I knew nothing about and I haven’t melted into a puddle of goo. So what’s one more time?

Not being good enough. Aye. This ol’ chestnut. I’ve always been good enough. Maybe not on day 1 but I get there every single time. I’m not content with average so while I might be rough around the edges to start with, I will make myself good enough.

Not making enough to live on. Life is simple when you choose to make it so. The measure of how we see success determines the size of the measure used to determine ‘enough.’ What’s enough for one is not nearly enough for another. My ‘enough’ doesn’t require an 80 hour work week and 6 figure salary. 6 figures is a bonus but not if it comes at the cost of my peace.

Writing out all the reasons why I’m afraid to change has made me realize how small and pathetic those reasons are when measured against the cost of staying the same.

Fear has kept me living small until I was pushed past the fear; sometimes against my will, sometimes willingly.

Every time I’ve gone beyond my fear, I’ve gained experience and strength. If I’d let my fear of failing stop me from learning to scuba dive, I would never have met my best friend and I’d never have seen some of the most beautiful sights in my life.

Despite the perpetual fear of not being good enough, I went to art classes and learned to paint. I’m not Michelangelo but I like the pictures hanging on my walls.

Lack of experience has not kept me in a small box. I’ve taken the lack and I’ve learned, I’ve grown and I’ve pushed myself to excel each time because I won’t accept anything less.

Not fitting in is kind of my thing in this world. I’ve always been the spiky toy in the box, the one who has no filters and doesn’t conform on principal. What has that gotten me? Equally crazy friends whom I adore to bits!

Uncertainty? Yeah, every damn day. I hate it but I handle it because that’s what it means to put on your big girl panties.

Looking at these reasons dispassionately through the lens of logic highlights how high the price of NO has been. And how unnecessary…