Saturday 24 July 2010

Do you enjoy your life or

do you race through it?

This is the question I've been pondering for the last few days. The reason for it? Well, I fell back into the binge eating trap. I've eaten the wrong stuff without giving it too much thought and even worse in high amounts. Because eating was somehow something that I just wanted to get over with.

Wrong approach!

Now, life is special and as far as common knowledge (I don't get into any religious discussion here) goes, we have only one and I think we should enjoy it to it's fullest. Every moment is a gift and will never come back.

But I for myself don't really live in the moment. I found that most of the time I "multi-task"and therefore can't really enjoy the sensations and experiences. Okay, let me give you some examples to make it clearer.

When I eat I normally do also some other stuff at the same time, like listening to music and reading or listening to music and surfing the net or listening to music and thinking about or even writing my next blogpost.
As you can see I love music, I barely leave the house without my iPod (before that it was my walkman). But the funny thing is, I always do something else while listening. It somehow became a background noise and I rarely (I haven't done so in years) just put on my big headphones, lie down and just listen and enjoy the music.

Same goes for bodycare. It has somehow become a chore, instead of simply enjoying the smell and texture of the products and how my skin, mouth, feet feel afterwards.

And not to forget: the training. I am never really there. I think about blogposts and stuff that I have to do, but I'm not really enjoying to move and to train. What do you think about when you train?

Now, after having given this all some thought, I've decided to slow down. To really enjoy my food, to enjoy caring for my body and to cut down on multi-tasking. Sounds easy? Well, it isn't. I really had to push myself to sit down and eat lunch while not doing anything else.
Dinner was slightly better, even though my mom was around and in a really rotten mood while putting away some fresh produce she had bought. So I had to listen to music to drown out her noise. (Man, I really need to get a job and move out. This is driving me nuts.)

Really good. I'm doing nothing but writing this post for now. Wohoo.


To end this post on a high note. I did send out another application and a different company gets a look on my profile through the school (one of the Account Managers contacted me). Still, there are three more applications to write until Monday morning. But I'm finally out of this slump I've been in through the first weeks of July. No more all nighters for asian dramas. (I still watch them! *happy sigh*)

Tomorrow Chris and I will go on our usual Sunday morning ride and in the evening we first eat some ramen at the ramen restaurant and afterwards we'll enjoy a movie. (Don't know which one yet.)

The new blog design is due to the fact that the former skin provider changed its service and since their website wasn't reachable, I gave the new Blogger design builder a shot. I quite like the outcome.

Next post will probably be another Taste Bud Adventure, since I went shopping in the asia store today and got some nice new food stuff to try. First thing I tried for dinner today had ingredients such as Wakame, Soba noodles and Mikawa Mirin. It was tasty, though I really need to change the amounts. Good thing I'm going for a ride tomorrow. Oy. And I have currently a thing for cheesecake, I could eat it all day, wonder where that came from...

KEEP MOVING FORWARD!!

2 comments:

  1. I've been thinking about this for several hours now. Many people multi-task because they think they can pay attention to several things at once. Some say they are easily bored. Or they think they don't have enough time to do the things they want to do, so they layer them on top of each other.

    Don't take this personally, but those people are cheating themselves. Human's can't really divide their attention very well. Think of all the collisions (they are NOT accidents) people have while driving. It's one of the most dangerous things we do. Most of these collision are caused by driver error, most of which were caused because the driver wasn't paying attention to the road. They were doing something else.

    Music, for example. Set aside 5 or 10 minutes to listen to a piece of music you like and are fairly familiar with, something a bit more complicated than some bubble gum pop confection. Now listen to it on the highest fidelity device you have. Listen carefully, with all your attention. Play it several times, listening to different parts of it. The vocal track, the strings, the percussion. What are each of them doing? I think you will find that you will hear far more than what you've heard before.

    Mostly, I think about training when training. What I'm doing. How it's feeling. How my body is reacting. How hard I'm going compared to the plan. What I'm supposed to be getting out of the workout. I pay attention to what my body is telling me. Naturally there are times my thoughts drift, but I bring them back as soon as I recognize it. Of course there's a certain amount of overhead required to work out safely, such as watching for traffic or pedestrians or dangerous conditions. But most of the time I work out alone, so I'm not distracted by other people and what they're doing.

    When you slow down and pay attention to one thing, you do it much better, and oddly enough, you won't get bored. If you are, then you aren't paying attention. Almost everything is more complicated than first appears.

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  2. Great post (ya I am this behind on my reading)

    My brain shuts off while training, thats why I train so hard. One of my favorite sayings that explains it best

    "Racing is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it's absolutely cleansing. You can go out there with the weight of the world on your shoulders, and after a hard race at a high pain threshold, you feel at peace. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain. At least for a while you a kind of a hall pass, and don't have to brood on your problems; you can shut everything else out, because the effort and subsequent fatigue is absolute"

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