Out of Sight, in my mind!!

I've been busy this last one week. Busier than usual. I'm sure there are a few eyerolls from people who know me! The fact that I am a stay at home mom with two grown children and a husband who currently works from home is not lost on me. But my mind is busy, busier than usual-that's what I meant. Well there's more.

I've been hoarding up on magazines, almost exclusively cooking related ones, for a good part of the twenty five years that I've lived here. Back in the days, way before when, dinosaurs weren't roaming the earth, but close enough, Vincent and I used to go to 'Barnes and Noble' that noble bookstore, and while he perused the software aisle, I used to walk up and down the cookbook section and bring back books to a cushy couch, read recipes and copy them on the back of any slip of paper I had in my handbag. No super smart phones then! And then I started subscribing to magazines like Sunset and Better Homes and Garden and Ladies Home Journal. And about twelve years ago, to Bon Appetit, that chock full of recipes magazine. Flipping through the magazine, I might end up liking maybe two or three recipes. But I would diligently store the books away. One entire shelf in my pantry had in fact, been taken over by these magazines. The drawer under my coffee table had been filled up too. A few folders here and there, some stashed in magazine racks....There were about two hundred and fifty magazines lying around. 

Once one acquires a smart phone, recipes are literally at your finger tip and you can bookmark them for future use. You might end up looking at a recipe that is in a magazine in your pantry, but you don't have to go find it-the recipe is right there on your phone! You can even print them out and save them. Oh, I do have a couple of binders of such recipes. In fact that one is very nostalgic for me, because I still have recipes I cut out from newspapers back home, while in Chennai and while at work in New Delhi. In fact, the copier was my friend at work. I used to cut and splice recipes to fit a paper and then photocopy it. And yes, I still use some of the recipes. Chop Suey? Neychoru? Yes!

But peri menopause and edging close to 50 years of living on the planet brings you this realisation that maybe you have too much baggage. Literally and figuratively. That I have a few(eyeroll!) pounds to lose will be the subject of another blog post at a later, yet to be determined date, but I am speaking about clutter. Physical clutter we hang on to. Like my stash of cooking related magazines. That is what brought me to take a good look at the pile and go," I'm gonna tackle it, one book at a time, flip through every single page, and photograph every single recipe I like and then recycle the darn book". I settled comfortably cross legged on the floor, phone fully charged and the entire contents of the drawer under the coffee table piled next to me. 

Three Bon Appetits in, my neck started hurting. Sitting erect and flipping through a hundred pages and clicking only three photographs was starting to annoy me. I looked at the mountain next to me and decided I would tackle the Sunset magazines for a change. It has only one third of its pages devoted to cooking. Six of those magazines in, I was furious with myself. What the heck!!The recipes weren't that impressive. They weren't urging me to run to the grocery store to buy some exotic ingredient and start cooking.  But I persisted. Fifteen magazines in, I stopped photographing, and started tearing pages that had recipes that I though I might at some point in life try out. The tearing out was cathartic. But also slightly impractical. Some recipes were splayed over multiple pages, or were back to back. But I hacked away. That day, I persisted until I was cross eyed looking at pages and pages of recipes and seemed this close to giving up cooking forever!! But my pile had gone down only by say, a fifth.

But, labor omnia vincit and all that, so I kept going over the next few days. My perspective changed. Instead of picking recipes of fairly common things which are easily available on the internet, I went for truly unique ones, exclusive to the magazine in question. It was also a trip down memory lane, when I came across recipes I had tried before, the paper creased and sometimes stained with oil, or some spice. Some had comments I had penciled in like, "Very Very Good!" Hah!! Snip that one for posterity! So I kept at it and the pile got smaller and smaller and eventually after about 15 man hours, spanning almost 4 days of intense hand eye coordination on my part, I tore the last paper out of the last magazine. 

What now?

I was left with a pile of torn pages that needed to be inserted into plastic sheet protectors and then put into a three ring binder I had. I gave up for the day. But I was happy with all the space I had created in my pantry for more stuff, which I am sure I badly need to stock up on. Well, I'll tackle that when I can't find salt or pepper in that clutter.

Stuffing an entire page with a recipe taking up less than half the page seemed an inefficient use of pace, so out came my scissors and glue stick. Putting both to good use, I clipped just the recipe I needed and stuck it on top of the ones I didn't and sometimes ruthlessly covered up eye catching photos of the dish, just because it saved space. This endeavor went on for the good part of two days, with all the other household chores executed without any disruption. 

And then, in the process of adding these new sheets to the binder, I spent another few hours trimming the ones I had already filed. I got rid of  a few recipes that way. What had seemed like an absolutely  essential recipe to save for later, in hindsight turned out to be a boring one not worth having saved at all. All those years of hanging on to something useless in reality. Lesson learnt. Some recipes, I looked at with affection. Having made it quite a few times, the taste lingered in my tongue and mind. I rediscovered recipes that I had saved but rarely made. They got a new life on my stovetop. A noodle salad, a chocolate chip cookie recipe, all from yonder years.

And finally, almost after a week of all this cutting and sorting and pasting, I was finally left with two folders filled with recipes. That was a perfect conclusion to my bid to downsize. I am yet to cook anything from my new harvest of recipes. But now, I know, if the urge hits me to try something new, I will have a limited number of pages to flip through before I pick one to my liking. 

Definitely less clutter. More space. Less indecision once the need arises. More clarity. Freedom. The feeling of lightness.

And then, it struck me. If freeing up some actual physical space and getting rid of unwanted physical stuff can feel so liberating, how much more liberating would freeing up our mind of clutter be?

I know that project would be a much longer one. The book collection is a quarter century old and pertains to just one topic of interest. The mind? Oh my! A fifty year collection of thoughts and opinions and impressions and teachings and facts and unwanted and useless bric-a-brac. Of course intermingled with all of this is 'useful' stuff. What was important in childhood is maybe past its date now. What was significant in adolescence is useless now. Facts considered essential to one's wellness might be detrimental now. Example: Alcohol and Perimenopause don't do well together, for me atleast. a recent revision of facts. Sorry, that one is mine and mine alone! 

So a revision is due. Your mind helps you decide pretty much everything in life, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. And that decision making is based on all this stuff stuffed in your mind. How much of it is relevant, useful, fair, ethical, moral, right and just? How much is just there because you've been holding on to it because someone insisted you do? Maybe people in authority? It could be your parents, teachers, you priest at your place of worship, your close friend, your manager at work. Is it your opinion? Do you agree with it?  Example: For a lifelong Christian, I don't believe in Heaven and Hell anymore. Why use the carrot and stick method to make people behave? Why can't people do good just for that, without any reward being promised, now or in the future? So out that goes from my mind. Here's a funny one to balance out the previous statement. My dad used to tell me when I was a kid that my tummy would burst if I ate three bananas. For people from India, especially the south, this will be a head scratcher. There are bananas the size of your fingers and then there are bananas the size of your entire forearm. Which one was he talking about? I once ate three of the fingerling ones and panicked. My Dad had to backtrack and say he meant more than three bananas. At which point, I lost trust in that statement entirely. One fact for the trash bin.

This pruning of the mind is a lifelong process. Allocating a specific amount of time will not be enough. But revisiting the file folders in our head once in a while is a good idea. And any cutting and pasting will be a gradual process. Lessons will be learnt, experiences will be lived through and can cause us to rearrange the folders in our mind. But we need to peg away. Reassess and reorient. 

And of course, it is a painful process too. Giving up beliefs, ideas, opinions that were long held, but don't stand the test of time is nerve wracking. But, it frees up your mind and opens it to much more pertinent things. And considering we live in the age of misinformation, we need to be vigilant about what we store in our brain cells. 

So there, physical, mental taken care of. 

Now for the people I need to prune out of my life😐😐..well, your list is completely up to you!!!