Better eating through chemistry

Continuing on the "adjusting to life back home" series…
Though the cold and snow was obviously the first thing to smack us upside the chin once we exited the airport, the other big adjustments (food, prices, and overwhelming mountains of "stuff") can all be found in one great big interactive museum celebrating the incredible ingenuity, efficiency, and creativity of humankind right alongside its gluttony, vanity, and hubris—the grocery store.

I'm dreaming of...an Ecuadorian Christmas

People keep asking how we're adjusting being back home, acknowledging the considerable differences of life in Ecuador to that in Colorado without actually knowing, or at least being able to appreciate, what those differences probably are. Our Ecuadorian friends have wondered the same thing, and since many are not as familiar with the American Way as, well, Americans, I'll do these next posts for them in hopes of also shining a brighter light on the obvious for the locals.

Teeter Without a Totter: Work/Life Balance

Hot on the tail of my last post, Di and I talked a bit about life balance. A part of our motivation to take a family Sabbatical was to "get away from it all". We certainly succeeded. But even when you do succeed in being purposeful with your time on what amounts to an extended holiday, there is something about "work" (in the sense of how you make a living) that is still essential and rewarding like nothing else. So as we now look around for work back home and twiddle our mental thumbs in the meantime, Di suggested the need for a post about the other half of the balance that we're all usually trying to get away from.

As Nigel Marsh says in this TED Talk of his, "I found it quite easy to balance life and work…when I didn't have any work." When you swing the pendulum far away from what we all generally consider to be the necessary evil of work, it comes back to hit you right in the forehead with the realization that you don't need to—nay, can't—do away with it; you need instead to balance it with your spiritual, emotional, social, and family lives. Oooooohhh, so that's what they call it work/life balance.

Piper has recently been complaining about being bored with just playing all the time. She's actually just making a poor case as to why they should be able to watch movies, but I think we grownups are experiencing something similar that probably comes from that amazing childhood skill of creating something to do out of nothing. We adults have a similar, if less adorable, capacity to completely fill our free time with things that make us feel like we are accomplishing something by the mere fact that we are doing something. But as someone once asked me (in an elevator, probably), are you a human being or a human doing?

We found our time on sabbatical, and even still here at home while unemployed, inexplicably occupied. For me, it is not until I apply filters (scheduling tasks, not answering the phone, staying off e-mail, etc.) that all those distractions go away. And then I try to plan and measure all my work by output, not by hours put in. I believe that is the greatest problem we all have with spending too much time at work—by focusing on the work itself and not why we work. No matter how much you love any kind of work, it is rarely fulfilling spend time on it without feeling it is time well spent.

So, now that we have walked quickly enough from one side of the teeter totter to the other to make it bang the other side, we're inching our way back to try to find the sweet spot in the middle.

Seeing Behind Your Own Reflection: Planning & Purpose

Could you move, please? Trying to take a picture here.

People ask how our sabbatical was. It was great, I say. Then they say with their eyes, Thank you, Anderson Cooper, for that invaluable piece of investigative journalism. Seems they're looking for something more. But it's a small talk question with no good small talk answer. So I'll try to be specific with some answers, starting with…what we learned about planning and purpose.

Diana and I were overworked before our sabbatical, so I hope I can be forgiven for fantasies of lazing in a hammock in Ecuador, sipping fruity drinks with umbrellas, whilst the kids were being enriched in school all day. But you can stare at your toes only so long. So I had a list of things I'd enrich myself with. Learn to play guitar. Learn to draw. Read War and Peace (or was it Crime and Punishment?). Stuff like that. But it turns out that a goal without a plan is like a husband with a remote control but no channel guide.

Some people are naturally single-minded, purposeful, and focused. Di and I are, shall we say, susceptible to distraction, so we particularly need to plan our goals, objectives, and strategies or we veer off in large-scale Brownian motion—frantically busy, yet accomplishing nothing.
So even though we did some planning, we were fortunate enough to learn through our sabbatical that our planning can stand some improvement.

First thing we learned was that some of our goals were so nondescript as to be faits accomplis. Learn Spanish. OK. "Una otra cerveza, por favor." Done. Next?

So some sort of qualification helps. What would you like to be able to do with the Spanish you speak? Clearly ordering another beer tops the list but hopefully doesn't end it as well. How about be able to have a cocktail conversation in Spanish or be able to talk with our children's teachers?

Then, though we had goals and general ideas of what we wanted out of our sabbatical, we rather expected that once life as we knew it was out of our way we'd be achieving all sorts of things. But once all those typical distractions (jobs, council meetings, committee meetings, managing rental properties, kids' activities, etc., etc.) were gone, we still didn't achieve what we thought we would.

Once having stripped away all the trappings of modern life, then, what could possibly be keeping us from achieving what we believed we could? It was a bit like trying to see behind your own reflection. When everything else was stripped away, it turned out, the only thing left to blame failure on was…us.

Rats.

So, for example, any shortcoming in our Spanish-speaking abilities was clearly not because we had to work overtime or deal with frozen pipes. It was our failure to plan exactly how we would learn Spanish, and how much time we'd dedicate to it, and how we'd measure our progress.

But once we got over feeling crappy and stupid, and came to accept our responsibility to create more structure for ourselves, and forgave those damn people who are naturally driven and organized for making it look so easy, it was an empowering moment. It never, ever was all those distractions of life that we believed monopolized our time; it was always, and shall ever be, how we decided to react (or not) to those things. It's all much more in our control than we thought.

So, self-discovery accomplished. We just need to plan. Right. Now, uhh…exactly how do you make a plan?

Behind white eyes

Actor's portrayal of the author

People often ask what it's like going back home. It's 21 degrees be-freakin-low zero is what it's like! Sweet Jesus, we really picked a great time to be pedestrians again. Bikers, even. I rode to the coffee shop at 7 this morning with nothing but my eyes exposed. I should have had goggles on. I had goosebumps on my eyeballs. I had to go to the mirror in the bathroom 'cause I swore I was bleeding from my eyes. Turns out it was just most of the water I drank last night, warmed in the furnace of my belly, shot out of my glands like windshield washer fluid to keep my eyeballs from cracking. But it's gotta go somewhere, so there I was in the cafe with ice on my lashes, looking like a sea anemone. I had to ask to stick my head over the grill so I could close my eyes. And when I finally settled into my spot at the cafe, I looked at the weather again and realized...I had forgotten to switch my readout from Celcius to fahrenheit. Heh.