The Lost Art of Planning

As I sit here and write this blog post, in the background is the Food Network talking about pizza . . . why do I torture myself so?  Actually, pizza does not have the hold on me that it once did.  There was a time that I could head over to Broadway Pizza and polish off a thin crust medium 5 topping pizza.  No kidding.  I never intended to eat the whole thing, in fact I'd go in planning to eat half and even asked the server for a box when the pizza came so I could put half of it away immediately.  Somehow someway I never left with a box. Oink oink.

It's different now, tho.  Hubs and I will get a pizza maybe twice a month now, always a small, and we split it, often with several pieces left.  I'm not really sure what happened to be honest.  I never tried to change this, but maybe my body starting telling me something that my otherwise good sense wouldn't hear of . . . slow it down Cheryl.  Slow it down.

And that reminds me, today I picked up my mail and in my box was my Good magazine.  Ever heard of this publication?  When I subscribed, I got to pick what I wanted to pay for it.  Seriously.  And, some (I don't remember what the percentage was) of that subscription fee went to the non-profit of my choice.  I chose Kiva, a cool organization that puts together people who have money with individuals in third world countries with an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to escape poverty.  The money is "given" as a loan and their payback percentage is something like 99%.  Pretty cool way, I thought, to give a hand up to someone that the banks would never consider credit worthy.

Anyway, back to Good and their slow issue.  The anchor article tells the story of Oxford University back in the 19th century when the roof of the dining hall needed repair.  When the dons approached the school forester about securing wood for new beams, he informed them that when the college dining hall had been built centuries earlier, a stand of oak had been plantd in anticipation of just this moment.  Five hundred years later, the roof was failing, and the trees were ready!

There's of course a lot that can be said and written about this.  But, what I want to focus on is the seemingly lost art of planning.  Losing weight that lasts forever requires it as does anything that we want to last.  This whole thing I'm doing this year is NOT something that I want to finish just so that I can rinse and repeat.  No, I want the weight I'm going to lose to be permanent...because that's really the only kind of progress that is, well, progress.

So, I'm giving careful thought to the method of my madness . . . we're getting back to basics, moving toward what Michael Pollan has called an eater's manifesto:

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Doesn't get much simpler than that. And by doing this I'm planning to be around for another 30-40 years.  I want to stop making my life about the immediate and instead practice a little slowing down, experience more often the excitement and pleasure of delaying gratification, and doing things in a quality sort of way so that when they have served their purpose and need replacing, the trees will be ready.

Slowing down to plan,
Cheryl