According to Anthony Bourdain, the fish on Mondays is leftovers from the order on Thursday in preparation for the Friday and Saturday rush. And that’s why you’ll see “Chef’s Special!” as they try to offload on Monday.
And there are lots of other tidbits in his seminal book, Kitchen Confidential.
I highly recommend the audio—something about Bourdain’s voice that is so inspiring.
Just an observation: I think we have figured out how to lower the temperature in the culture. Not by much. By degrees. And slowly.
It may not seem like it, especially if you live on social media. By no means has that cesspool of social media cooled any. But people are slowly starting to see this isn’t any way to live—in constant fear that is. I’ve seen it in parents, with liberals and conservatives. I’ve seen it with the young and the old—all walks of life.
After ten years of skiing, it feels like I learn something new every year. I think the reason is that I am still open to learning. Mostly because I am self-taught and learned in a very unorthodox way (walking up hill to ski downhill). I’m patient and don’t feel a need to rush the process. I’m not doing it for money. I do it cause I love it. And as a result, I still find joy in the process. The process doesn’t have an endpoint, much like this blog.
It isn’t easy to reconcile what it means to have meaning in a capitalist society. Because what brings about so much status —how we spend our time on the factory line, all the training leading up to becoming a worker bee—can make it seem, from all the external feedback, that this is what life is for. But life isn’t about production. It’s about living. And what you can’t quantify, you can’t grow. Precisely the opposite of what the growth imperative capital stands for. Humans are the meaning-making machines. Not corporations or marketing or whatever social media tells us n
The strength of a relationship isn’t the absence of conflict but in how you resolve conflict.
While lead climbing, if you feel scared, you tend to clip the quickdraws high when you are below. But as you do that, you get even more tired. You are working extra moves to be the rope to your mouth, then clipping.
Over the course of say 14 clips, you might do 7 extra moves just to teach the top. It adds up.
There’s a metaphor here with fear and performance.
The more afraid we are the more likely we are to fail.
Skiing is therapeutic. And so is exercise, sunshine, journaling, eating a healthy diet, sleeping well, being kind to yourself (and others), cutting down on social media, quitting a stressful job, working on a relationship, letting go of the past, forgiveness, and so on. It might not replace capital T Therapy. But it sure helps to do the basics. Sometimes we fall into the trap of the big/quick fixes in our lives when we should be focused on the little things we can control—our choices and our attitude — that can go a long way.
I’ve been a strong proponent of understanding the decisions one makes under stress. During those times, we have to make choices that we wouldn’t make otherwise. And when the emergency is over, there is no announcement that it is over. So the body keeps reacting as if the emergency hasn’t ended. Over time, this can have massive compounding effects. To the point, it can be as simple as changing the thermostat temperature to trigger a strong response. These things don’t make sense on paper. But they are genuine in our lives. It’s worth doing the work to figure out why we do the things we do. And so often it is because we made a decision long ago that made sense at the time, that doesn’t make sense anymore to keep making today.
It takes tremendous courage to choose to be happy in this day and age. Part of the problem is that people don’t believe they deserve happiness. We don’t honestly believe good things can happen, so some of us struggle not to sabotage our lives in ways that create the next emergency. The next emergency will come, but how we treat it is a choice.
I’m not sure if you have to forgive someone or something for the past. To be clear, we have a bad habit of being quick to anger and slow to forgive. At the same time, I do believe there are some things so egregious that you don’t have to forgive. In fact, the pressure to forgive often shifts the responsibility off the one who committed the misdeeds in the first place.
In other words, I think it’s horrible to tell someone, “You’ve got to find a way to forgive.” If you can—please do. If you can’t, however, I think the better step is to learn to accept it and be at peace. Don’t let them hurt you anymore.
What’s more important is learning how to let go of your anger (or grief, or loss, or whatever) before ever finding forgiveness.
As the saying goes, “If you want forgiveness, find a priest.”
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