happy attitude

Yesterday at M and T's I browsed through one of Martin Seligman's books (he's the learned helplessness guy). According to Seligman happy people live longer. Yikes. My rhetoric, unfortunately, is generally negative or analytical. One longintudinal study of nuns (!) (they're a great subject pool because they share attributes of a healthy lifestyle) found that initiates who described their upcoming move to the convent in "happy" words lived longer than those who intellectualized their feelings. I am planning on changing my attitude. Is it possible for a pessimistic person to become a happy one? Or would my efforts be like a fake smile?

I am not succeeding at consistently making the right dietary and lifestyle choices. I don't know why I find it so hard to take good care of myself. I've got a lot of knowledge about healthy diet, but am still challenging myself by eating conventional crap: sausage and beer at N and S's party when there were fantastic salads on the table, a whole burrito last night when half would do. No exercise to speak of. I want good self-care to be as natural as breathing. What can I do to live "right" without becoming obsessed with it?

Practice practice practice.

Keep good foods in the house.

Make good food ahead of time.

Don't be hard on myself.

Get joy from doing what's best.

Happy Mother's Day.

f**k it

So on Monday, after more than a year of discomfort and discomfit, I received a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis. Didn't get a script because the doc was on vacation, which is fine because I'd like to go alternative and not allopathic. Don't like the mind/body split. And don't like the idea of masking rather than rebalancing.

But I did catch myself behaving allopathically last night at 11 when I grabbed a slice of really-bad-for-me extra cheese pizza. If I were thinking integratively I wouldn't have eaten it. Buying into the schism (hence the "f**k it") I was able to pit myself against myself.

The revelation made sense at the time.

The pizza also agreed with me.

Maybe it's like the Macrobiotic sage who said that if one has a Macro attitude, any diet qualifies.

Mid-course correction

I'm not a strong believer in mid-life as a crisis point.

I do think it's an opportunity for something like a mid-course correction. Enough time living to grasp what's working and what's not, and to have a sense of agency about the next chunk of time.

Today I was just happy to be alive. Since discovering (on-line) a few weeks ago that an ex-boyfriend had unexpectedly died, I don't take anything for granted. It's not that I am unexposed to death; my mom died when I was 20, my dad before I turned 30. But D. is the first friend to die, and that feels significant: he will always be 48, his experiences stopped there. But I'll move forward in time. And now I'm older than him.

G. took some photos of me today. I like the way I look when she's behind the camera, but I was shocked at how much white was in my hair. I don't look that snowy in the mirror.