Normalcy Shedding

We learned this week experts believe people who contract the COVID-19 virus shed high amounts of the virus early on in their infection, often before symptoms, which helps explain why it has spread so quickly. We’re contagious before we know it.

In a similar way, we’ve been sucked into the vortex of the crisis before we notice the symptoms of anxiety developing. In this crazy week when all normalcy has been shed, my journal revealed a gaping ten day hiatus. I wonder if yours - or whatever your journal equivalent of hopeful, connected living - has to? And I wonder if like me - in rapid fire data receiving mode - you were too overwhelmed to tend to the practices you do to stay grounded.

It’s understandable. We’ve needed to stay informed, take action to cancel plans, check in on our elders, upend our routines, and to keep our dry coughs at home (where mine has been since Wednesday.) One of the better explanations for why our anxiety levels are particularly heightened is because this is a crisis that asks us to hold our individual health in one hand (where the risks for most of us are low) and public health in the other hand (where the risks are high) - a complicated tension and no longer virtual reality we can neither click through or scroll by.

We’ve had a lot of information to digest in this last week, but after we’ve done what we are able (this article "Social Distancing: This is Not a Snow Day" was particularly helpful), what next? Will we merely react to and retrench with the next alarming headline or will we be mindful to look not for the silver lining, but the cherry blossoms. To see how this virus will spur new medical and technological innovations, acts of kindness and community care, and lifestyle changes.

New Yorkers are riding their bikes in lieu of taking the subway. An Israeli company is developing washable, reusable masks with embedded antiviral agents. The company Zoom is giving K-12 schools their videoconferencing tools for free. An NBA player donated money to support the hourly arena employees after NBA games were cancelled. An elementary school teacher came up with a clever idea to get her students to wash their hands more often by stamping their hands at the beginning of the day and offering prizes to students who washed enough to get the stamp to fade by the end of the day. Families are playing board games again.

Trials and uncertainty can’t really have a neutral response. When all that is normal is ripped away, it either eventually drives you to despair or deeper trust where creativity and care can flourish. Not in one day but in the trial’s incubation period. We either believe we are living in a world that is falling apart or in a beautiful but imperfect world that is in process. And if the latter, belief is only meaningful if it’s practiced with as much vigilance as washing your hands often and thoroughly.

Living the Life You Love

My husband and I recently went away for the weekend, leaving our two teenage boys home alone.  Thankfully our boys have the responsibility and kind of relationship to make that work, even if it does mean they subsisted on bagels, Goldfish and Deliveroo for 48 hours.

When we got home on Sunday night, we got their weekend report which included soccer practice, a cycling race, homework, and a lot of and likely still underreported screen time.  But our thirteen year old was most excited to tell us that while he and his big brother were Home Alone, they had not wrecked the house but rather he had written something. 

He didn’t write it for school (our first question.)  He wrote it “because I realized I am happy right now and I thought writing might help me understand why.”

Thirteen is not the most becoming of ages.  I’ve been relaying an analogy I heard recently about parenting teens.  Our teens are now out in the pool (the world) swimming on their own but occasionally they get dunked or tired and need to come back to the pool wall (their parents).  We are there to hold them up to catch their breath but as soon as they do, they are off again — usually with a push against the wall (forceful words, attitudes, behavior) to get back out there.   

I know I am prone to hyper focus on the challenges of each age.  And thirteen has a lot of them but thirteen can be beautiful too.  In that push for independence, when we give them space — they aren’t just swimming in the world.  They are also figuring out for themselves how they will react to life’s curve balls.  Their thoughts are as deep as the waters they are swimming in.

And so, on this Valentine’s Day, I share with you what one 13 year old boy — Lawton Ballbach - has to say about Living the Life You Love:

“All of you sprouted and flourished into this earth, to live. To let yourself flow and become the best version of you. We don’t pummel life with anger and jealousy, but sometimes it seems the easier option. There’s no way to describe life, there’s too many ways. We love, we learn and we believe. We look at problems and turn them to a different angle to find the solution. A wise man once said ‘no one ever injured their eyesight by looking on the bright side’. Proven studies have shown that you, and everyone else around us lives longer, dies happier and brings joy to those around us, by just stopping and taking the time to appreciated and fulfil the life we were meant to love. Me writing this doesn’t have to make you change your way of thinking or acting. But I can guarantee that if you dig a little deeper inside your mind you’ll find what you’re looking for. “ 

Menopause

Menopause, or whatever this thing is that happens to a female’s body when it’s winding down from any future tenancies, is not a friend to your sleep or your mood.  It wakes you up in the middle of the night to change tee-shirts and then has you pulling off your jammy pants at 7am because you’ve accidentally knocked an entire cup of hot coffee and coffee grounds onto yourself.  Then adding insult to burn injury, you feel like you can’t  trust yourself to make a second cup.  

It’s exactly those kind of unrested, uncaffeinated, unsteady mornings that you should not ride the bus into school with one of your old tenants who vacated thirteen years ago.  Because whatever they say - bold or benign - is bound to storm around with your hormones making you feel worse.  “Please don’t come because your exercise clothes are a little embarrassing” is hardly warfare but when your defenses are down, it finds a crevice.

“Wait, don’t tell me. Kate!” beamed the Starbucks barista who surprised me by remembering my name later this morning.  I’m sure he recognised me in my exercise clothes.  That too finds a crevice. 

Whether it’s menopause or something else that robs you of balance, there is some shame in admitting you feel empty or have longer lapses of joy when you have a life littered with good things.  You feel like you should be able to hold on tighter to the many things you’re grateful for when a challenge comes.  But I was reminded today, it’s exactly those moments of challenge that are our signals to stand up and work to find strength. 

“I know, I know …” said my wise Psycle instructor as we climbed through a particularly tough stretch of the workout.  When things are hard we don’t want people to tell us how to fix it, or that we are doing a great job, we want them to say “I know.”  We want to know this is hard for other people too and not just us being a wimp.

Maybe - I’ve been wondering as I learn to befriend this stage in life - even a forced-upon-you imbalance in your life can been a grounding force for good to help you cycle through admitting need, building strength and receiving grace. 

Most importantly, regardless of the thing that has you out of sorts, the people in our lives are too interested in loving us than keeping a record of our grievances.  

“I like you.” texted my husband out of the blue today.  But of course it wasn’t really out of the blue because the people in our lives know exactly when we need to be reminded we are not only loved, but still good company too.

Overdoing It

I was planning on running with my running group this morning but I woke up to my body cautioning maybe I should take the day off instead. Much as I wanted a fifth day in a row of working out - it’s a gorgeous morning here in London! - my fatigued legs (and a late night at the theatre) reminded me scheduled rest is the key to insuring ongoing enjoyment of exercise.

Our bodies are good at adapting to whatever we throw at it, but they are also the first to shout at us when we are overdoing it. It strikes me that exercise, like so many things which bring pleasure, follows that stubborn economic law of diminishing returns.

The law of diminishing returns says there is a crossover point where the benefit gained is less than the increasing amount of energy invested. A point at which more of something either returns less of the thing you hoped to gain, or worse, spirals downward into pits like injury, addiction, or chronic couch potatoing.

It’s why that third piece of pie is never as good as the first. Or why there are studies that attempt to calculate the ideal income for life satisfaction and emotional well-being. Or why you can even consume too much of something as life-giving and necessary as water.

There is the possibility with any pleasure to overdo it. We have our Thanksgiving meal every year to remind us of this truth. If history is any guide, I am likely to overdo it next week - around the table with my family in Seattle — on mashed potatoes, post dinner turkey sandwiches, and wine.

Virtually everything in the physical world follows the law of diminishing returns which is why it’s important to both enjoy pleasure and be mindful that we can often find ourselves chasing a moment we once had that may be impossible to find again.

However what good news there is in knowing the spiritual world and one’s inner life is not bound by those same rules. A subterranean peace and joy that breaks through into our daily living do not dim the more you experience them. We can’t hit a limit or max out. And they don’t need rest days or celebratory days.

Like a flower, our beauty too unfolds in the light of presence.

Restraint as Parental Work

Every disappointment our children experience has two arcs. One through their tender but still roomy hearts and a second one through ours. And while our hearts are better acclimatised to hurt, these second hand blows make their way through our hearts and settle into our bones.

This past weekend one of my children had one of those heavy disappointments. The details of the defeat might not be specifically relatable, but the experience of getting to within inches of a goal and then having to walk it back most surely is.

Our 16 year old son is passionate about road cycling. It’s the kind of obsession that drives him to get up several mornings a week while it’s still dark to ride before school. It’s a harrowing hobby for the streets of London, but passions don’t care much about postcodes. Neither do they apparently care that my front entry is cluttered with bike gear.

Not everyone who has a passion desires a competitive outlet, but that is not this kid. The trouble is that youth road cycling races are not easily accessible at a competitive level in London. There aren’t many of them until you are 17 years old (Junior level.) He has done plenty of other cycling races, mostly duathlons, but those have all been as one of only a handful of youth in an adult race. And more importantly, because those type of races are individually focused they do not allow drafting/riding as a group. Which when your idols are Tour de France riders, is the way you want to ride.

After a lot of research this summer, he discovered he could qualify for a youth road cycling race if he were to get a British Cycling License. He navigated the paperwork for that on his own and had to wait a couple of weeks to receive his official license via Post. Once he finally had that in hand, he dug around and found a right-sized, draft-sanctioned race just over an hour from London and signed up for it.

Before this opportunity could meet preparation, the race confirmation came with a set of detailed rules - exactly the kind of thing I’d gloss over but he knew to read with care. Good thing too as he discovered that he needed to make an important adjustment to his bike.

When his Dad could only partially solve the adjustment, he took £20 and walked it over to our local bike shop first thing on Saturday morning. When the local bike shop couldn’t do any more, he emailed the Race Director. When the Race Director didn’t respond, he took it upon himself to the get to the race two hours early to work it out in person. These are all the kind of hoops one is willing to go through when you want something bad enough.

Over text he told us that during the gear check the Race Director said he could ride the race but it would be a DQ for British Cycling points. Not yet having any British Cycling points, this was of little concern. He was in. We asked if he wanted us to come watch. He texted back: “Well if u want it’s ur choice” which anyone with teens knows really means YES! and come camera-ready if you insist.

That’s a lot of back story but it’s important context for what happened next. Fifteen minutes before the start of the race, he got a flat. Though always prepared, he forgot to bring a spare with him. He called us to ask if we had one. We were on the train but hadn’t brought one and wouldn’t be there in time to help. The only solution was for him to find a Good Samaritan With a Spare Tube in under 15 minutes. Not good odds.

We arrived 10 minutes after the race started. We watched the first pack of youth riders whizz by. And then the second pack. We kept watching — hoping — until the youngest of youth riders passed by and the first pack was back around for their next lap. This was the exact kind of race he had been hungering for … and he wasn’t there.

This time a text came through just to Brett. He was walking to the train station. Too far out of London for there to be taxis, with a broken down bike too big for an Uber Prius, he had walked the 45 minutes with his bike back to the train station. In flip-flops (so as not to damage his cycling shoes.) Of course, like all sad stories, it was also pouring rain.

We found him on the train platform. He wasn’t crying but he literally could not speak.

Anyone with children knows what it feels like to witness your child suffering a disappointment they weren’t expecting. It’s a kind of full body pain that has a way of bubbling over into an avalanche of words. We ask clarifying questions. We problem solve. We offer words of comfort. We make promises we’re not entirely sure we can keep. We give pep talks. We make small talk. We do our very best to keep the sadness at bay and start looking ahead at next time, or ice cream?

That is my normal go to response but somehow this time, I felt like my job was one of restraint. He maybe needed my presence but he certainly didn’t need my words. Sadness needs space to spread out before you can figure it out. And so we rode the train home together in silence. And it felt like parental work.

Later that night I hugged him and told him how sad I was that he had the day he’d had after so much preparation and anticipation. He met my teary eyes with his blood shot ones. I then told him that while I didn’t know what the reason for it was, I was certain that it would help to make him stronger. He nodded in agreement. And that was all I said. Because in my time of parental work, I realized that figuring out those reasons was his work, not mine. Something he already knew.

The Making of a Ragnarian (or something like that)

You know when someone asks you to do something really awesome but really hard and normally you could respond with “that sounds great, but I can’t because …”  and then they have the audacity to tag it with “…next year…” and you don’t yet have your excuses lined up for NEXT YEAR, you know what could happen ….

You could find yourself sitting in a really big van early on a Saturday morning with head lamps, sleeping bags, and enough GU gels to supply a small village in route to some place called Sittingbourne with the expectation that you and your van mates will manage to run every mile between it and Brighton by Sunday afternoon. GRL PWR on the move.

That happened this past weekend.  We ran a Ragnar Relay Race.

Psst …  because you absolutely won’t know enough about English geography in advance of committing: here is Sittingbourne on a map.  And here is the way they are expecting you to run to Brighton.  Red rover, red rover, they are asking us to FREAKIN’ RUN VIA DOVER!

Here was the pitch:

“Take to the road with 9 friends for the trip of a lifetime, as a Ragnarian, you'll embark upon a journey filled with fun, bonding, and obviously, running (both night and day).  At Reebok Ragnar White Cliffs your team will tackle a 170(ish) mile course that snakes through picturesque towns, rolling fields, and the most beautiful collection of white cliffs you've ever seen. Entering this unique, overnight relay means night-time runs, turning a spacious van into a temporary home, and a bond-strengthening experience like no other.  Each teammate runs 3 “legs” with each leg ranging between 3-11 miles and varying in difficulty.”

Here are the 10 of us who signed up for this as Team WRW 9s:

Here’s what they don’t tell you:

Someone will get lost.

Someone will get sick.

Everyone will stink.

Re: getting lost.  Although 100+ teams all start from the same place, you spread out quickly and find yourself usually running without another runner anywhere in sight.  When the signage is good, the sun is up, and the shins aren’t screamin’ - it’s all good.  In the dead of night — we all know — things ain’t alway so magical.  This could and did happen to one of our teammates, Meredith (shared with permission), who happened to draw both the hardest and most complicated legs :

“Ohhh let me tell you about magical! It was the f*cking Blair Witch Project. I set off into the dark park ie woods. Following that blue dot. Took one wrong turn I’m in the middle of the park just a blue dot turning in circles. I’m flat out hyperventilating, running in circles, screeching and saying “Mommy mommy mommy.” I call, they try to help me. I end up down a dark path at a fence. Back track now I have no idea where I am. I seriously was off the deep end- it’s like every law and order episode I ever watched (the SVU ones). When it was clear I was not making it out alive  they had to send the rescue car to find me. So the rescue car drops me at the exit to the park where I proceed to finish the race about an hour late in tears. Remind me please to never volunteer for anything involving map reading, nature, headlamps-woods, dark parks. I need a stiff drink and a massage.”

With three legs each, everyone has at least one night run. Not everyone gets to run with the sheep. The sunrise is a welcome thing come Sunday morning.

Re: getting sick. Our bodies are creatures of habit and 36 hours of nut balls, Ramen noodles, and portable loos is hard on even the best of bowels.  When you train for a race like this, there are no guarantees that your body will give you what you need come race day.  We had a teammate -our Team Captain Roni - go down hard with the flu during the race.  While it could have been a cause of despair or dropping out in a normal race, the rules of a team relay meant we were allowed to pass the baton to another teammate and get support for the one in need. 

Re: stink.  You know how one dirty sock can ruin a car ride?  Multiple that minefield by 9 and throw in everything else worn.  Do not be fooled.  A van is not a temporary home.  It is a smelly van.

So why did we do this again?   Because:

That person will be found.

That person will be cared for. 

Everyone will eventually get a shower.

And because we can say that we finished running 170ISH MILES together.  

We of course didn’t all have the same views or same terrain or same distances. 

BUT we shared stories and photos from each of our “legs” to fill in the gaps.  And, most importantly, we did have the same swell of confidence and wonder that comes from accomplishing something hard.  The confrontation of a white cliff — or the scuffles of daily living — may chip away at our belief that we are made to pull off some things only we can do in this one life we’ve been given.  The courage needed to do that grows in lots of ways but perhaps most obviously when we push hard and push together. 

Because it is guaranteed that sometime down the road, whether it’s a road you chose to run or walk: 

You may be the one lost.

You may be the one in need.

There will never come a day when you don’t need a shower.

Take-Out, the Terrace, and the Long Tail of Desperation

We’ve all been there.  A loved one is sick or in need but because you live across the country or in another country, you feel helpless to provide any practical support.  It’s a desperate feeling.  

This past fall I got a FB message from the wife of a old work colleague who had taken that desperate feeling in Seattle and turned it into virtual action.  Her Dad was going through prostate cancer treatment in London and so she reached out to the handful of people she knew living in London and asked if any of us might be willing to bring him a meal.  Take-out was fine, text was not.  A proper phone call would be best.  People responded immediately. 

That’s how I met John and his partner George.  It was a quick drop off of Syrian food at their flat in Covent Garden, but even in the eye of the treatment storm, they beamed with appreciativeness and interest.  It was late October and I had just recently come back from signing the papers on our new holiday house in France and mentioned it in passing. Through a few follow up questions - Condom as our nearest town always gets a rise - we discovered that they had a very close English friend who also had a holiday house in the same region (the Gers) of South West France.

Fast forward to last Tuesday when my phone rang as I was driving on the outskirts of Condom.  It was John.  The connection wasn’t good but through his more tech savvy daughter, I knew he and George were in the Gers visiting their friend Allison.  After playing cell phone coverage cat and mouse, they invited me over to Allison’s house the next day.  They kindly invited the boys too but with the combination of their cycling plans and the tangential line connecting this 60+ crowd to any person they remotely knew, I let them coast pass this invitation.

This time I showed up with a bottle of Rose.  Allison’s house was only a 15 minute drive from my house, which in the French countryside, is to say we are nearly neighbours.  The first stroke of serendipity.  

As I was introducing myself to Allison in her beautifully renovated farmhouse at the edge of a countryside hamlet, she asked whereabouts in London I lived.  As I started to geolocate my London house with landmarks very unlike the open fields we were looking at, she flashed with recognition. She had lived in the same neighbourhood years ago.  But when she said the name of the street, I nearly choked on my Rose.  In a city of nearly 9 million people, we lived on the exact same small terrace street of only 22 houses, only 15 years apart.  She lived in #2 and I now live in #20. Needless to say, the second stroke of serendipity came in with swagger.

It was delightful to spend time with John, George and Allison - who are all fascinating and warm people — and talk about further get togethers both in London and France.  They sent me off with the fill of some wonderful stories, including tales of John’s 70th destination birthday party in India now 10 years in the rear view mirror.  They also sent me with directions to a farmer down the road whose fresh basil was not to be missed.  Serendipity made sure I got their last bunch plus a free melon because “I was a friend of Allison.”

I couldn’t help but think that the compounding delight of the day started from a place of desperation.  How an email from a worried daughter in Seattle could be used to help someone meet their neighbour in the countryside of France.  This was a thread we could follow but there are so many unseen threads when someone rises up in love to help. 

Yesterday was the annual garden party for our terrace in London.  Having been the past two summers, I was sorry to miss it this year.   But then again, being with a terrace alumni in a garden of box-hedges, lavender and roses, maybe I didn’t miss it entirely.

How (the Idea of) A Rebel Book Club Helped me Find the Jet Stream

Sometimes finding the jet stream or seeing an old challenge in a new light be like this: 

1. You browse through (last week’s edition of) Time Out London because better late than never.

2. You see an article titled “Eight Bloody Brilliant London Book Clubs.”

3. Before you can even finish the bloody article, you’ve already started the google search “Rebel Book Club” - the editors pick for Best Book Club for non-fiction fans.

4. Within 90 seconds, you’ve decided that you will apply to join.

5. You shove the website under your husband’s nose and he says, “Why would anyone pay a monthly fee to read a book?”

6. You meekly say something about community and cocktails, but then within 90 more seconds, you have a new plan that involves printing out the library of 48 book titles the group has already read.  

7. Armed now with the list so you can read like thinkers & doers, you pull up an app you’ve already paid for called Blinkist to start getting the book summaries.  After all, you are a doer even if you have chosen to lay forth and conquer.

8. Since it’s too early for a cocktail, you make yourself a second cup of coffee, wish for a donut, and settle in to the first book summary: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth.  

9. You are intrigued enough by the key messages of the book to send your Economics major son a WhatsApp about the book suggesting *he* read the full thing.   

10. Since you need to set your sights on something more doable than building an economic system that encourages growth while also preserving the environment, you move on to the second book summary: Atomic Habits by James Clear.

And there it was.  The actionable thing I wasn’t actively looking for but needed to hear.  

The main idea in Atomic Habits is that small changes in behaviour done over time can have a big impact.  The author described it with this analogy:  if a pilot of a plane taking off from LA to NYC decided to move the nose of the plane 3.5 degrees to the south - a change so small that it would not be felt by passengers -  at the end of the flight, you’d be in Washington DC not NYC.  Small change, big impact. 

Patience then is having confidence that though you may not be seeing immediate results, you know you are on the right trajectory.  Habits are one way to get yourself on that trajectory.  I may still jiggle in the middle but I’ve got enough of a habit around exercise that should I stay the course (and manage my chocolate intake), things will eventually firm up.  

Things however have not been looking so good in regard to my getting any closer to having a basic conversation in French. With a French home, car, and bills to pay, I have an incentive to learn.  I have plenty of learning materials.  I have had fits and starts with using them but absolutely no habits that have stuck.  I have tutors - who can’t charge me - living in my house.  But I have had this massive mental block. “Bordeaux, we have a problem. We can’t figure out how to take off.”

Since the whole point of personal growth book is to do something, I decided to apply the principles described in summary on Blinkist to my challenge of learning French.  The first thing I did is reframe my goal.   It’s no longer “Learn how to speak French,” my first goal is “Learn how to be more comfortable and not panic when someone is talking to you in French.”  Along with a more realistic goal, I’ve set a smaller daily habit of 10 minutes a day and bundled it with my use of my laptop.  Now when I fire up my laptop, I made a rule that the first thing I force myself to do is go to one of my paid online programs and listen to one audio conversation in French with subtitles, on repeat, for 10 minutes.  That’s it for now.

We are still in the very early days but another thing they tell you to do is to us trackers, make contracts or in my case - write about it - as a way of making you more accountable.  I was telling my youngest son about my breakthrough and he said: “Isn’t that just common sense?”  Probably. But dude, I wanted to tell him, sometimes you need to travel a curvy road, take a pass on a Rebel Book Club, and relax into something you kind of knew but didn’t know how to start. 

It seemed apropos that todays’ conversation included this:  “Ah ben ! Ce n'est pas simple, hein. Mais on essaie.” Translation: “Oh well ! It's not simple, is it ? But we try !”

Meeting Ottolenghi and the Case for Cauliflower

It actually happened.  I met one of my heroes last week.  Thursday, April 25 to be exact.  It didn’t unfold as I had scripted it in my mind, casually bumping into him at our neighbourhood green grocer while evaluating some broccoli rabe or reaching for a packet of sumac.  Instead, I met Yotam Ottolenghi at a book signing after hearing him speak as part of a panel at the British Library on the topic “Taste: How Does it Work?”

Though I didn’t think ahead to bring one of my many marked up cookbooks for him to sign, I waited in line with a post-it note.  He was as generous and engaging as I imagined he would be, seemingly delighted to hear my story about feeding three hungry boys (he having two boys himself) who now refer to “Ottolenghi” as either a verb or food group category.   We then talked about being neighbours — I told him what street I lived on and he told me which street he lived on, though it was a detail I already knew.  We all have a little stalker in us.

And while it was fun to meet a celebrity chef who has single handedly up’ed my cooking game, I’ve actually been thinking more about the topic of the talk that night — taste and why it matters — more than I have been daydreaming about my famous neighbour bumping into me, remembering my name and our delightful conversation and then casually extending a dinner invite.   My brain has been tied up and my kitchen in varying states of experimentation to get too far into my Yotam Delusion.

It’s a given we need food for survival.  It’s also well understood that we need certain kinds of foods to deliver nutritional value.  Receptors in our mouth help check for poison and pause for kimchi.  But taste and flavor is that elusive thing we don’t have a great vocabulary for and yet are also wired to need.  The wired bit has to do with the fact that many of our 26,000 genes are geared towards our senses.  Taste then is that deeply personal experience in our nose and mouth (and to a lesser degree our stomach) that makes us either want or reject a second bite.

Perhaps most interestingly, taste isn’t something that’s static. Though we each start in different places (and different parts of the world with different food options), it is up to us to develop.  We can moderate our tastes like a dimmer switch through exposure.  Receptors drop off if we don’t use them.  It’s why you can hate mushrooms as a kid and learn to like them as an adult. 

It was a stimulating conversation, but it’s been swirling around in my head because it’s interlocked with this equally mysterious verse from the Bible: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”  I’m not talking in a literal communion wafers and grape juice kind of way (because that would be tragic), but in a metaphorical kind of way.

We were taught the four basic food groups to deliver nutritional value in the same way that faith has been reduced to a basic moral framework.  We count our good deeds like calories.  But faith, like food, is only absorbed when you let it pass from lips to your gut.   And like taste, which is so specific because it’s tied to our individual memory centers, we don’t have a lot of useful language to explain the phenomena of faith.  We just know it’s the thing that moves us to want or reject a second bite.

It makes me think of the many people I know who had an early bite of religion and thought it was not very good.   But if taste is truly dynamic, is it possible that what we put in our mouth or heart one or two times isn’t the final word?  If converts have been made out of the Case for Cauliflower then isn’t the Case for Christ worth a few more tries?  In the same way it’s not useful to label a child a “picky eater” when eating is one of the few things you have true agency over as a child, it also seems hasty to accept an early decision you made on something as delicious as avocados because you weren’t into “anything green” back then.

One of the other interesting things that Yotam and the taste panel talked about was the danger of the movement towards homogeneity. It’s not only the sweetening of the global palette through packaged products that condition people to crave more sweetness and softness that is alarming, or the many known diet related diseases, but it’s the movement towards the “flattening out” of taste that poses the greatest threat.  It’s a threat because one size does not fill all and because our gut requires variety.  Sounds a lot like the danger happening in many churches. 

Anyone who cooks knows that sometimes it’s a labor of love.  But when you watch someone’s reaction to something you’ve made — and you know it’s good — and then you see their eyes roll back and they make that “mmmmm” sound,  there is pleasure going both ways.  Maybe it’s a little like that verse that keeps urging us to try new things: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Video Ready ...

I know there’s an easier way to do it — in the same way I know I can speak my texts — but it’s hard to teach an old Blackberry user new iPhone tricks.    And so when I want to free up storage space on my iPhone, out comes my laptop and cables.  Excuse me, my MacBook Pro.

I’m making room on my phone this morning in anticipation of taking some videos later this week. My youngest son has a role in his all school play.  There will be 3 performances this week and so 3 opportunities for me to take poor quality, zoomed out, shaky hand iPhone videos that only a grandparent can love.  I’m sure I’ll give you the chance to like them on social media too.  Best of luck finding him.

As I was clearing off some videos on my phone, I couldn’t help but notice how bad so many of them were.  The videos where you start recording 20-30 seconds too early and still nothing very interesting happens.  The videos where you start recording too late and miss the goal or save.   The ones where your subject is altogether not happy about you videoing.  The ones where a random head enters your frame and obstructs your view.  The ones where you try to capture a moment that has passed and it’s so..not..looking..natural. 

Sometimes we do get the timing right and we are able to capture a moment.  It’s rare when it happens but the authenticity of the moment makes those videos instantly shareable.  This video of my son serenading me with this of-the-cuff beat box six years ago was on of those moments.

It got me thinking however that we don’t have to wait for the iPhone to be turned on at just the right moment.   We are the official storytellers of our lives.   We are the only ones with the full length footage and we are the only ones with exclusive editing rights on how we share our experiences.  There are some bad experiences but most of our experiences have a shareable moment and it’s our job to mine it.  Not just for the world, or our friends, but mostly for ourselves.  We get to decide where the close ups will be and where to fade out.   Your best stuff probably won’t have the Eiffel Tower in the background or you in a duet with Bradley Cooper. But it will have some gold.

It’s an awesome creative task to decide what bits to leave in and what bits to cut out.  We can replay all the borings bits, or the missed opportunities, or the obstacles in the viewfinder, or the conflicts, or chose to tell the put ons rather than the naked truth.  Any story finds an audience but the ones that have an impact, the ones worth sharing, are the ones where something authentic was able to shine through.  

You don’t need a laptop or cable to make room in your heart,  but you may need to siphon off some garbage saved in anticipation of moments ahead you won’t want to miss.  And good news is you’ve got a front row seat.