Thinking

Practicing Qigong this morning I thought:

• when I practice so early, there are certain movements I don't do for fear of disturbing the peace of others as they rest...#6 and #9.  Skipping #9 often leads to skipping #10.

• I could feel my brain/mind bouncing back and forth...I bordered on feeling dismay, but kept pulling myself back into balance from that.  As the Spring green maple leaves danced about with the breeze out the window (I've started practicing facing Eastward to hone in on my Liver...the view is wonderful :-) my mind caught on their beauty and life.  I realized why it feels so good to me to be outside in Nature.

When I am in Nature, my brain relaxes a lot.  The elements demand attention, and I succumb wholly.  And nothing splinters, like it does when I am inside sometimes.  Note to self (again and again...yet more addition and subtraction): get outside more.  It will help me feel more whole more of the time.

Speaking of addition and subtraction, I'm not sure what to do about my food.  Driving home from our wonderful and leisurely playdate, the kids and I talked dinner.  (When they are playing with friends, they often do not eat well.  So, as soon as we hit the car, they realize they are pretty hungry.  And the rest of the day they tend to feel quite grumpy and fragile.  I need to think about this, too.)

I knew making the burger buns as originally planned was out.  They were going to have to rise for 30-40 minutes before baking.  Also, to be completely honest, without my own food "stuff" set, it's hard to not want to eat/share the new, interesting, yummy stuff I make for the rest of the family.

So we went to Whole Foods, were stunned by their expansion construction (the M-town Whole Foods: the little Whole Foods that could!), and picked up some provisions for them.

What I grazed for dinner last night: Alphatots, frozen shoestring fries, a coconut ice cream sandwich and popcorn with soy butter and salt.

How I felt last night: dizzy, dazed, confused (I called Cap to ask him to pick me up some garlic knots* while he was out at the comic book store with the kids and then frantically called him back a minute later saying "no no no that's gluten!"), tired, flat.  I can't tease out whether gluten/wheat has this effect on me (I had some more of the Chinese take-out eggplant for lunch and the ice cream sandwich had gluten in it) or whether my system is overwhelmed by trying to hold too much.

By the time I was going to bed, I felt unwell to the core.  Not sick, per se, but very quietly, deeply, off.

When I meal plan today or tomorrow, I am going to build in a plan for my DW meals.  I need to subtract something to allow for the space to do the DW food prep and the more structured sitting-down-to-eat which remains elusive.

I can feel a flutter of panic as I think about the accounting work which I also really want to add which means two things need to be subtracted.  Well, this is my work for today, to do these figures.  There's something else, which I will simply push to next week: subtracting some tv to make room for an earlier to bed and earlier to rise (I'm thinking a walk around the block first thing in the morning sounds nice...)

* I've been watching a show called Parenthood and a character in an episode I watched yesterday (this is how out of it [though I am beginning to recognize that when I am "out of it", inside, I am actually quite restless and unable to be still long enough to focus on much at all] I was, I was watching tv in the early evening.

Some more to think on: watching tv..."unwinding"...may be a band-aid, may be genuinely therapeutic.  There may be something to my affinity for the tv and computer screens that is related to my type of brain.