Who the Hell Says Wellness Has to be Boring?

I used to hang out in an AOL chat room for people with cancer and their supporters. One complaint about being “healthy” was that “health foods taste terrible,” or “I’d rather die eating a double cheeseburger than a rice cake,” or “life’s too short not to indulge!”

People are truly confused about boredom. They live tedious lives filled with repetition, and they call “health food” boring?

We really know nothing about boredom and, when you spend 90% of your free time doing things not to be bored, well, that’s an endless cycle that we’re going to try to end right here.

First off, boredom, for the most part, does not come from outside of ourselves. It comes up from the inside.

Sure, this concert is boring, or this baseball game is boring (I’ve never seen one that wasn’t), or this movie is boring.

Yes, there are things outside of ourselves that are called boring, but there is nothing intrinsic to that thing that is boring; it’s our relationship to the thing that is boring.

I used to think art (paintings) were boring. “So? it’s a painting. Big f*****g deal.”

That is until a little woman came into my life and opened my eyes. She showed me detail, talked about history, how the painting fit into history, how shadows weren’t always the absence of color but were color, and even the flow of the artist’s brush or his choice of colors, contrasting them at times, and how the contrasts jumped off the page.

Take this painting. It shows some guy tilling a really small garden with a horse, and below him on a different ledge overlooking the sea is a guy tending his sheep. The brilliant sun is setting, the wind is picking up (you can see that in the sails of the ship). So why is it called The Fall of Icarus?

Well, if you don’t know mythology, you can always look up the story, but I’ll give you the gist of it: Icarus was given a pair of wings fashioned by his father who stuck feathers to a wooden frame with wax. He was warned not to fly too high or the sun would melt the wax. Icarus, totally ecstatic with his new-found ability to fly, got too close to the sun and, sure enough, his body crashed into the sea.

So why is that painting called The Fall of Icarus?

Take a look at the bottom right section of the picture.

One day we looked at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and she asked me if I knew why he drew circles of light around lights. I told her I had no clue.

She told me that there were many theories, but the one she liked the best was quite recent. She said that it had been discovered in “art therapy” that people suffering from schizophrenia had a tendency to render light with those same vibrant circles.

Needless to add, I was hooked, and I’ve been hooked on art ever since. There was a time when I could walk into an art museum and start lecturing on the periods and artists in every room, even describe content, theories, and techniques down to brush strokes without ever looking at the tiny plaque on the wall with the name of the artist and title of the work.

Something that had been boring to me suddenly opened up into a newly found interest that took off and gave new meaning to my life. And some of you know that I’m an award winning photographer today (mostly retired), which all started with that young lady who opened my eyes.

So what the hell is wellness???

Wellness is anything that makes life more livable. As the old Jewish saying goes, “When you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything.”

Ask anyone who’s lost their health. They’ll tell you how “right on” that saying is.

People who smoke live in hell. Their lungs hurt, there’s that constant cough, and they’re always huffing and puffing after walking a few yards. They’ll tell you they “love to smoke” but, in reality they are a slave to their addiction. There’s always a cloud of dread over them because they know their heart could just give out at any minute, or they could be diagnosed with lung cancer and slowly suffocate.

And what about people who would miss their Bacon Double Cheese MuthaFugga with Curly Fries and a Coke?

Coke (and all soda pop) was once a treat, but now it’s a staple. Fries? Have you ever made fries at home? The British make chips all the time and it’s intensive work. They know how much work goes into a serving of “chips.” But, with the advent of “corporate food,” we can get these work-intensive foods for pennies on the dollar, and we don’t have to slave in the kitchen for them. Oh, and that big burger? It’s not what’s killing us. It’s the Coke and the Fries? Well, there’s that bun made with processed white flour and a bunch of chemicals. And if the meat is factory farmed, well, it’s got antibiotics and gunk too.

But in reality, how many people make this sort of thing a staple? Three times a week? Four times a week? How often do we visit a fast food place and get the same thing?

And you tell me wellness is boring because you can’t have your daily tedium?

Really, the same meal over and over is the definition of tedium.

Some of our recipes at this site are very exotic, but each is designed to be healthy, or at least healthier than the original recipe.

We don’t need to eat 152 pounds of sugar a year to be happy! (That’s the average American’s sugar consumption.)

And you don’t have to give up your burger, fries, and coke either as long as you put boundaries on your indulgences.

It’s not what you do Saturday night that counts, but what you do all the rest of the week.

Also, did you know that you can take supplements to counter the damage of your indulgences?

For example, the most dangerous substance in that burger, fries, and Coke are the fries. Heating carbs at high temperature creates acrylimides, which are carcinogenic (cause cancer). And chlorophyllin is one substance that keeps them from forming. Take a chewable or two with each meal that has french fries and you’re good to go. And here is a link to Chlorophyllin & Mint from one of our best affiliate programs.

Again I ask: What the hell is wellness?

Peace. Peace and love.

Really. It’s just that. When you are at peace, you are perfectly well. And when you love yourself, you won’t abuse yourself.

Your past isn’t intruding on your present, and you’re not at all worried about your future. You are present. You are in the now.

You can breathe. You can breathe freely.

Wellness is creative. Tedium is the nemesis of wellness, peace, and love. So instead of “having the usual,” you look for something new to try. A new kitchen adventure. A new road trip adventure. A new place to take the family for a night out.

And have a glass of wine, dammit! Or a good beer from a micro brewery. Have you ever tried Cognac? I was in the liquor store one day and it hit me: I’ve never tried sherry, brandy, or cognac. So I bought a bottle of each (three bottles of brandy since it comes in different flavors). And I’ve discovered that I just love Vanilla Brandy.

Drink up.

When I lived in Israel, wine flowed at every celebration and every holiday. They sing songs about wine that are thousands of years old.

Now get this: when the Russians let their Jewish population leave the country, suddenly Israel had an influx of many, many Russian Jews, and something new to them: alcoholism.

You see, alcohol has a place in Jewish traditions. Families grow up with a bottle of wine on the table at all times. And it’s definitely not kosher to get sloshed at the dinner table.

Alcoholism is usually not something you see in the Jewish culture. But these were Russians. They drank to forget. And Israel wasn’t prepared to handle an influx of alcoholics.

Because of their history with wine (it was Jesus’ first miracle; turning water to wine) they didn’t know what to do about the newly arrived alcoholics.

You just don’t take wine away from anyone. You give them wine to be happy and celebrate with you.

But again, an addiction is tedium. The same thing over and over and over . . . .

Creativity

You don’t have to carve a sculpture, paint a painting, compose a sonata, or write a novel to be creative.

You can be creative in the kitchen. You can be creative in the bedroom. There’s nothing better for your body than a session of sweaty, sheet-ripping sex.

You can be even creative on your evenings together. Fix something special, find a bottle of bubbly, rent a good movie (there are only 60,000 movie titles online), have a picnic in front of your wide screen TV. You can even call for an intermission, pop in some music, and dance, dance, dance.

Hippocrates believed that walking was the best exercise for human beings. But then, Hippocrates never danced his ass off.

If you don’t have someone special in your life, get a puppy.

I remember a family who rescued a puppy and gave it to grandpa. Everyone said that the puppy would outlive gramps. Well, that puppy kept gramps alive a lot longer than he would have lived without the puppy, and grampa held that puppy in his arms when it died of old age.

Live life to its fullest.

That’s wellness, dammit.

Go for a walk. Rip off your clothes and go skinny dipping. Play hard and often. Breathe. Work tirelessly in your kitchen to create something rare and wonderful. And love. Love something. Love yourself.

Now get out there and live!

Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an L. Give me an I. Give me a V. Give me an E. L-I-V-E. LIVE!
Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.

 

Maude from Harold and Maude