230425 "relative clumpiness" and other bits
April 25
On my phone, Dylan's Gotta Serve Somebody is playing. Haha. I had been thinking of a god just this morning, and said a prayer. A return to a god is the creeping of the faint-hearted, in the face of creeping old age. I long for arms to hold me and tell me it's going to be all right.
The wide open thought-landscape of philosophy is terrifying to the old-age mind. I realized last night, as I sank gratefully into the mundane thoughts of here and now, of reading a book. or thinking about buying a new toothbrush. It felt like retreating from a volcano mouth, or wider, a blackness-filled universe too great for the human mind to grasp, too deep to swim in, too dark to see into, too mindless for refuge. Here again I want a god to reach for.
If only, I think, I could make the young people see this mortality, realize the precious gift of life and live it, use it to climb up, while there is still limitless height. But, I fear, it is a paradox of life that this very limitless future is what stops the children from seeing its ephemeral value, while it is still there before them.
I have found new strength recently, however. I have driven the 401 and the 403 twice in two days, and somewhere in there I had an appointment with my doctor and with Rocky's vet. I have spent several decades navigating the highways of Toronto, and it requires careful attention and coordination. For a forty-something grown-up in their prime, attending to the needs of several other people, this is laughably easy, yes. I have been so limited by my health, shut in by the pandemic and out of practice at being a normal adult. But today I feel much more my competent self, from before my illness. I hope for a more complete recovery; I should not be doddering at this age!
Did bubbles a couple a times last week. They never get old, always a small magic.
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I am grateful to the community of writers with whom I have fallen in, on Facebook. From the perspective of one who remembers the old social "milieus", when you met in person, and connected with friends physically present, it is different. Interesting term: "Physically present". I am reminded for the hundredth time of the Asimov story where he visits, in person, with people who have only ever met each other "virtually" in hologram form. He is of course indistinguishable from a hologram. (If you know the name of the story, please contact me through my fb page.) These writers write every day. One or two of them seem to belong to a group or class, and are given assignments - a short story, a thousand words, etc. They spend some part of each day working on their craft. I must take my life works, the things I am working on at this time, seriously, and spend time doing them. But my old job, homemaking, persists, indeed there is no-one else to do it, but it takes time and seems to trump other "jobs". I noticed yesterday that I take Rocky out for a walk when there is a spare moment, just to see how the day is doing, more ways to put off "working".
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In other news, I know that I am now converted to a whole foods diet. My idea of a wonderful afternoon snack today was air-fried, completely unadorned potatoes. I do not want to eat foods that have been processed! I have made it to the other side of healthy eating. I used to wonder why we do not desire to eat healthy food. It is the gut biome: it knows what "food" looks like and sends pictures to the brain. These two talk a lot more that you might think. I think that our taste buds must be in on it. It is scary, therefore, to think of the commercially-prepared products that make up most of the western diet. What is it doing to us? Is this where the cancers come from? Certainly it is where diabetes and heart disease come from. Instead of suggesting a change of diet the doctor prescribes medicines.
I follow a group called Gift of Health, out of Newfoundland, led by two doctors who prescribe diet change instead of medicines. They are inspirational, giving me support and encouragement. Their approach is plant-based as well as whole (unprocessed) foods. * I have not yet gone completely vegan, but it is getting closer month by month. I want to achieve this not only for my health but for the planet, and for the inhumane treatment of the animals that become our food.
In timely fashion, an article showed up in The Guardian (April 23), which addresses this very idea.
"Recently, evidence has emerged that foods high in sugar and fat can actually rewire the brain to demand more in the future. In a study published this year, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne gave one group of volunteers a small pudding containing a lot of fat and sugar every day for eight weeks, while a control group got a pudding that contained the same number of calories but less fat.
The result? The first group’s brains began responding more to the high-sugar, high-fat desserts, showing notable activation in the dopaminergic system, the region in the brain responsible for motivation and reward. “Our measurements of brain activity showed that the brain rewires itself … to prefer rewarding food,” says Prof Marc Tittgemeyer, who led the study. “Through these changes in the brain, we will unconsciously always prefer the foods that contain a lot of fat and sugar.” " *
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