Bionic Teutonic

I just finished a book I really enjoyed and thought I would share. Not sure everbody would like it as much as I did, but it combines two of my favorite things: travel and history. It’s written by a Polish journalist with the awesome name of Ryszard Kapuscinski. The book is called Travels with Herodotus. When he was just starting out, he was given a copy of Herodotus’ The Histories, which I now feel compelled to read. Half of the book is his musings on his own travels and attempts to get to the essence of the places he is assigned to and the events which he is reporting on, and half is recounting and mulling over The Histories. Herodotus was born in Halicarnasus, (in modern day Turkey) 2,500 years ago, and set out to capture the combined knowledge of the world. So in a sense he was one of the first known reporters. He gathers stories from the people he meets and tries to piece together knowledge about various events and places. Ryszard carries the book with him wherever he goes and Herodotus is his constant companion. The language used in the book is beautiful and it is full of unanswered questions, posed and then left for the reader to ponder, which I love in a book.

After 15 years, I’ve decided that I am going to try not being a vegan for a while. I have though very long and hard about this and feel like this is the right decision for me (for now). A decision that has scared me oddly (even writing this post scares me), but I think that fear reinforces for me my feeling that I’ve become too attached to veganism as an identity and that I should back off for a while and figure out my relationship to it and reexamine my original intentions. A sort of vegan Rumspringa as it were.

A bit of history. I’d grown up eating meat (in Montana, Iowa, and Germany - all very meat heavy places). Even vegetarianism wasn’t much on my radar. At one point the girlfriend of my step-brother’s dad was a vegetarian and would eat tofu burgers, which my brother and I found completely baffling and would make fun of in a “can you believe what she is eating” sort of a way. Neither of us could really wrap our heads around it. The very concept was funny because it seemed so outlandish.

When I was in high school, I was pretty active in a variety of environmental causes and groups and I started to be around more vegetarians and even a few vegans, which also was a new concept. But at least I started to get it. Eating lower on the trophic pyramid means less land used to feed us means less deforestation. I could wrap my head around it and even began to contemplate it. Then one summer, some friends of the family (who were my age and vegan) from Germany came and stayed with my mom, Susan and I. So while they were with us, we made sure that the food we made was vegan and they did a fair amount of cooking as well. After the month they spent with us, I realized I had pretty much been vegan the whole time and it didn’t feel that difficult and I felt good.

Over the next couple of years, I really dove in. Reading as much as I could, experimenting with different diets and foods. And I was pretty dogmatic about things for the first several years. I was fully in it to win it and I’m sure was probably quite annoying about it at times. But I really connected with it and brought a lot of awareness and attention to what I was doing.

Now, 15 years later, I’m feeling a bit like I’m vegan by default. I don’t pay a ton of attention to my diet these days, which especially as I’ve become increasingly active is not a good thing. I know that I’m not getting enough of certain things in my diet and also don’t really have the motivation to really step up and do the nutritional research and experimentation to develop a good vegan diet for my athletic performance needs. Just to be clear, I’m fully aware that you can be very active on a vegan diet. There are vegan iron man competitors who are much, much more active than I, but it requires a level of attention that I have not had the motivation for lately.

Another thing that has been on my mind as I’ve been considering this is the idea of attachment and identity. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and studying of the yoga sutras lately. The yoga sutras say that the cause of suffering is “the association or identification of the seer with the seen”. Being vegan is one of the biggest identities that I have taken on over the years as who I am. Of course, it’s not who I am, but I’ve associated with it to a degree that I feel is a little too unquestioning at this point in time. It can make us a little bit too dogmatic when we claim an identity. And eventually it means that we have a set of rules that guide our behavior that don’t need to think about anymore. We don’t look for circumstances where those guidelines may not be the best thing for us. We can just sort of cruise by on autopilot and that’s what I feel like I’m doing right now with my veganism.

None of this means that I won’t be back to a vegan lifestyle in a couple of months, a year, or however long it lasts, but I think I need a reexamination. I’m going to have to go pretty slowly introducing dairy into the diet so my stomach doesn’t hate me. So we shall see how this experiment goes. I could hate it and come running back quickly, I could stay away forever. I’m really trying to be as receptive and attentive as possible and examine with an open heart and open mind. Here goes.

Ariel and I saw a great movie yesterday. Slumdog Millionaire. I won’t spoil anything, but it revolves around a street kid in Mumbai and sort of tracks his life from early childhood to early adulthood. Mostly what was fascinating was just the peek into the life of the slums. Slums the world over are crazy and fascinating places. On the one hand, depressing as hell. On the other, sort of a testament to the resiliance and ingenuity of human life. People will figure out ways to survive even in some of the most downtrodden places. The slums of Mumbai are in danger though.

It’s been snowing like crazy here in Seattle. And fluffy snow too. Not the normal wet, depressing stuff we usually get. Yesterday, it snowed most all day long. It was beautiful. People were out with sleds, cross-country skis, snowboards, trash can lids. Midway through yoga class yesterday (which was very small as people were either stranded or out enjoying the snow), the instructor opened all the blinds so we could bask in the glory. I used to have this fantasy when I was a kid about living in a cabin in the woods during the winter, where I’d cross-country ski into town for groceries one a week or so and just live in the woods. There would be lots of hot chocolate and marshmallows in this fantasy, lots of good books, and lots of snowshoe walks in the woods. It may not be quite the same thing, but right now, Seattle feels like a good substitute.

It snowed! Oh, how I miss snow sometimes. Granted, this snow will probably turn to slush soon, as I do live in Washington, but for the brief time that it sticks, it’s a winter wonderland. Across the street from us is the Seattle AIDS support group house, which sells Christmas trees every year. I’ve been taking Sassafrass by the house on our walks every day because they smell soooo good. Now all the trees have snow on them in it’s making me a bit nostalgic for the Montana Christmas of my childhood. I don’t know how I got so much Christmas spirit all of a sudden. I even went to the library and checked out the John Denver Muppets Christmas album, which we listened to every year as I was growing up. Totally cheesy but I love it. Also, the cold snap that is coming is supposed to be good, as it kills the beetle larvae that have been decimating forests around here. Yay winter!

So far, I’ve been really enjoying being unemployed. I have so much time to focus on the things I want to be doing and pursuing my new career which is great. However….. I have reached the point where I am at home WAY too much. It’s hard to maintain focus and concentration and I find myself becoming restless around mid-afternoon every day. The exact time when this restlessness begins occurring has been happening earlier and earlier also. That is one of the good things about having a job is that it forces you to get out of the house and imposes a little bit of structure on your day. And those days where I do get a lot done, by the time Ariel gets back home from work and my ‘work’ day is done, I can’t come up with the energy to be anything other than slightly bored at home. Yesterday however, I went to the library for the afternoon, and all of that disappeared. I got all the studying done I had planned, I got a long walk out of the deal, and when I came home, my brain wasn’t going all caged monkey on me. I think I need to do this more often.