reframing and restructuring
Ok, the formal thing was fun for a bit, the whole in which thing, but I don’t want to do it all the time. It occurs to me that I’ve been violating a fundamental web usability guideline by not titling my posts more aptly to describe their contents, and that if I did my readership might increase. But so what? I’m writing this for me, not for a Pulitzer.
Over the weekend I was going on about my business, working on one of my projects, getting ready for the week, and thinking about the situation I have surrounding my food supply. Normally when I plan meals for the week, I plan my shopping and meals from lunch that Saturday through to breakfast the following Saturday, which works reasonably well for me, since I do all my food prep on the weekends. Recently that has turned out to be problematic. If I don’t get to the store before lunch on Saturday, the whole menu gets thrown off. Even if I do, I have to pick something I can make quickly or eat out. Since I’m trying to do the raw food diet, as much as possible, eating out is not a desirable outcome either.
The solution came to me this weekend, a rather simple elegant solution I hadn’t thought of before. Why not change my meal planning and shopping from Sat lunch through Sat breakfast to Monday breakfast through Sunday supper? That way when I go shopping, I still have food I can come home and eat, and I have plenty of time to do food prep, as I’m not in a rush to get whatever the next meal is fixed. In March, this becomes even more important as I start the next module in my seifukujitsu class, when one weekend a month I’ll be in class from 8 until at least 5, and finding the time to shop may prove to be problematic too.
So what? I can hear you ask, and no I didn’t really intend to just tell you about my shopping habits. It made me think about things: if something like this has such a simple solution, reframing and restructuring the way I shop to simplify things, how many other things in my life are there that can be reframed and restructured to make things easier or better? Albert Einstein once said, “Problems cannot be solved on the same level on which they are created.” The problems of our lives cannot be solved using the same thinking that got us there in the first place; rather, we must change our perspective and look at them afresh from a different angle, a different view. In simplicity lies success, for the simple is also the sustainable, and sustainability is the key to maintaining change.
In particular, I need to reevaluate my projects for the year. I need to find a way to have more time, or somehow do things differently if I have any chance at achieving them, I seem to have little time for writing, which bodes ill for completing my writing goals for the year. Additionally, there are other writing projects I want to accomplish, some stories I want to write, some revisions to be made. So I need to carve out some time to do this. But it must be simple and repeatable, or it won’t stick. So, reframe and restructure - that’s where I’m headed.