Wednesday
Thanks to C’s work schedule I’m working from home again today, and am grateful for the slow return to work. Kids need to be picked up shortly, and tonight I’m on my own while C attends a show in NY for work so I’m here to cram a few thoughts in.
While traveling, I continued my personal research into the science behind fasting (had anyone conducted a study using human data as opposed to mice? etc) and found myself pondering the philosophical meaning behind deprivation.
In our developed world, we have an increasing amount of ways to fill the void – exponential access to news & entertainment, food of all varieties, social media, drugs both legal and non, robotic shopping assistants etc etc etc. There is no end to ways in which we might satisfy a craving, scratch an itch, feed our internal hunger, find fulfillment even.
But what if the truer road to happiness were in depriving ourselves of all this excess?
Finding our way back to our most basic selves, our center – the core of our being striped of artifice… in the search for real health.
The idea behind fasting is that when the body is deprived of food, it begins a process of purification – getting rid of the bad cells and making more of the good. I’m completely over-simplifying it but philosophically – what if the same were true of a more holistic deprivation?
My SIL sent me an article today that fits nicely into this idea of returning to basics, cleansing, giving ourselves a rest. The woman featured describes her journey toward a healthier way of being, stress being the initial catalyst:
The physical awareness she found through yoga is, she says, what brought her to cold-pressed juicing. “It allowed my digestive system to get a little rest,” she says. “I think today we generally need rest from a lot of things.”
Today’s listening also aligns: