Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame. When we believe “we must be this” we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down.

Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it Isn’t). Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (Penguin Publishing Group, Feb 2007)


Notes: Portrait: NPR, 2019

Saturday Morning. Walking with Lucy.

4:30 am.

I shake off the cob webs from Tylenol PM.

Read morning papers, blog posts, skim social media.

Read another chapter of Christopher Beha’s “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.”

Think about my index, and yesterday’s destructive acts. Guzzled two (or was it three?) bottles of Diet Snapple Peach Tea. Sugar Free. No preservatives. Turn the bottle to read the label. Aspartame, sodium, citric acid, potassium citrate, malic acid. Natural, my a**.

And then Nachos. Potato Chips. Three donuts. And, a large (large) number of Hershey’s Nuggets…like on a conveyor belt, I love Lucy and the Chocolate Factory. Oh, that milk chocolate sugar high.

C.S. Lewis said “Life (or Sugar), is as habit forming as cocaine. What then?” What then? What now?

I pause before weigh-in. Regret the Self-Destructive Acts. Inhale. Hope. I ease onto the scale, like tip-toeing is going to pare back a pound or two. A**holes believe that it will move down after yesterday’s performance. Disgusting. Disgusted.

I check the weather app. Think about how many layers I need. Should be one less with the extra layer of glazed donuts. Whale blubber is said to taste like arrowroot biscuits or Stop & Shop Cake donuts.

57° F, but breezy. No jacket. Tee-shirt. Long sleeved sweater. Camera gear. I walk by the island in the kitchen. 3 donuts left. Don’t you dare. Don’t even think about it. My mouth waters. My God, I have issues.

5:30 am.

I’m out the door.

152 consecutive days.

5 mile loop to Cove Island Park and back.

~10,000 steps…

600 calories…

Or approx 3 glazed donuts.

Gash in the heavens

The only other source of light is a gash in the heavens, its edges bubbling with clouds, as though the sky has developed an infected wound. The moon’s glow pours through.
 
—  Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House, July 5, 2016)

Photos: DK, October 9, 2020, 6:10 to 6:40 a.m. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT

Guess.What.Day.It.Is?


Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Or is this what being home is like: home as a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible?

Hisham MatarThe Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between


Image: Let’s Eat Cake