Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Feed Me

What feeds you, besides food? Something that makes you go Mmm, like food, or Ahh, like drink.

Besides that!

You need pleasure in your life. Food is a pleasure, so you eat. A few things happen:

1. Eventually, you gain weight. Gaining weight is not a pleasure, so...     a. you diet, which is also not a pleasure.     b. or you still eat, but now there's guilt involved. Not a pleasure.

2. Besides that, eating isn't so much of a pleasure if you're not hungry & you're not hungry because you're always eating.

3. But besides that, eating isn't so much of a pleasure if you're eating to fill up a place that can't be filled by food.

So either you take away the food, which takes away pleasure. Or you take away the pleasure of food, which also takes away pleasure. If you remember, it wasn't food that you wanted. You might not realize this. You might grimly throw yourself into a diet. You might guiltily chow through another sleeve of girl scout cookies. Now you're far away from what you wanted.

What you wanted was pleasure. Something that's a pleasure like food. Something that feeds you, that makes you go Mmm or Ahh. If you do realize this, you take another slow bite of oatmeal and ask yourself What is that thing?

If you can figure out that thing and feed yourself that thing, then you can forget about food. You can forget about how much you weigh. I can't just forget about food or how much I weigh, I'm not that kind of Buddha mind. I have to give myself something else to think about, something else to be happy about—

Happy weight isn't a weight problem, it's a happy problem.

ETA: But do you know what else I think, that "something" is just like food. It's a graspable thing to grasp the ungraspable with, and everything graspable gets worn out eventually. Systems don't last forever; so don't get yourself in a death grip on the graspable, let go of that. Get on a new pair of gloves, put your hands out for the ungraspable over and over again.