Sifting

Hm. This campus is full of wise women. I finally listened to my boyfriend's advice and had an honest talk with one of my professors about my anxieties and feeling behind every week. I'd worried a lot about having that conversation, probably because I feared (incorrectly) that I would be instantly judged. I was not. Instead, we had a chat in which she told me was doing really, really well - that the challenge for me in her class is not to step it up a notch but to learn how to reign myself in a little. She repeated, once again, that you need to pick your battles.

Pick your battles. It's a phrase I've heard often, but never really embraced. I generally want to tackle everything at once. It's tough for me to reign myself in, focus on just a few things and let the rest go.

I feel like I repeat myself a lot on this topic. Especially on this blog. Sometimes, I look at myself and think, "jeez, chill out ... why can't you just move on?" Then, I think that you readers (I'm assuming there's more of you there besides my mom and my aunties) must be yawning and thinking the same thing.

So, for my sake more than yours, I'm going to throw out a little more Natalie Goldberg because she helps me see my obsessions and preoccupations and steps backward in a more compassionate way.

"It takes a while for our experience to sift through our consciousness. For instance, it is hard to write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective. All we can say is, “I’m madly in love,” over and over again. It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body. We don’t know our new home, even if we can drive to the drugstore without getting lost. We have not lived through three winters there or seen the ducks leave in fall and return to the lakes in spring. Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in a cafe in Paris. 'Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.'"

-- Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (The Hemingway quote is from A Moveable Feast.)

p.s. Thanks to the veggie co-op, I have okra! What does one do with okra?