There are people who go through life with seemingly no illness, or problems, or even concern about other people. Everything is easily shrugged off. Perhaps, they live in the body, and not the head and heart?
Then there are people who feel too much, and they find it difficult to shrug things off. They live in the head and heart, and not the body.
Most, are a combination of these things at any one time, depending on people and circumstances.
My mother was very much a head and heart person. But she understood, to balance out the head and heart, you needed to attend to the body. For her, that meant keeping active, keeping busy, eating simply. Tradespeople were astonished by how clean and tidy her house and garden were. As a consequence, her doctor was always astonished by how quickly and easily she touched her toes.
These days, they call it mindfulness and exercise.
Distraction is also an excellent tool for heart and head people. So is writing. This blog brings those two elements together for me (doing it right now for just that reason lol). Not to mention the actual cooking, which I think counts as exercise 😉 😂.
Another distraction is reading. I don’t know when reading (except for news and current affairs) turned from being an essential part of everyday life for me to something I reserved only for holidays. Slowing down to read felt simultaneously a waste of time, and a luxury. But when I do, for example for this blog, reading, whether fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, helps my head and heart.
Dinner In A Quick Lunch Room
Soup should be heralded with a mellow horn,
-Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), Poem in the Public Domain
Blowing clear notes of gold against the stars;
Strange entrees with a jangle of glass bars
Fantastically alive with subtle scorn;
Fish, by a plopping, gurgling rush of waters,
Clear, vibrant waters, beautifully austere;
Roast, with a thunder of drums to stun the ear,
A screaming fife, a voice from ancient slaughters!
Over the salad let the woodwinds moan;
Then the green silence of many watercresses;
Dessert, a balalaika, strummed alone;
Coffee, a slow, low singing no passion stresses;
Such are my thoughts as — clang! crash! bang! — I brood
And gorge the sticky mess these fools call food!
To me, this lively description of a lunch room is a cheeky poem head-and-heart people might relate to. Like life, the reality of the dish sometimes doesn’t meet our idealised expectations. It’s also a struggle for us gentle woodwind instruments to be heard above the noisy percussion. But, after reading that poem, I feel at peace with it here. No point in punishing one’s self for choosing the wrong lunch room one day. Let the body deal with it. Shrug [shake] it off. Our lunch rooms, they will come.
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