Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Today’s article will be illustrated differently. I’ll use unrelated funny pictures… like the New Yorker magazine does.
Why? One of the ways I have opened up my tiny box is reading humorists’ take on the world. See the funny in everything. In every single thing.
Another way to open up your small box is to read, watch good movies or TV series from different cultures.
I subscribed to the Premium channel of Masterpiece Theater and PBS on Amazon Prime. Walter presents… I am watching my fourth series, British, Belgian, Italian, and now French. All in their original language.
I have, before, watched a lot of Singaporean, Korean series as well. Israeli movies… They are on Netflix, and I cannot watch Netflix now: it doesn’t work on my machine.
It may be important to watch the undubbed version, although I have watched Danish and Swedish series dubbed… but being forced to read the subtitles focuses the attention.
The more effort it takes to acquire something the deeper it goes…
Also, you can only see something in the contrast… or it is invisible. Meaning: your own. You may think that it is the right way to think, it is the only way to think, but in the contrast it is clear: different human cultures make different rules up, and they are all rules.
There are videos on youtube where the video creator shows the weird things of a country: very educational, a wakeup call.
The weird ways they eat, weird ways they talk, weird ways they choose is what’s important to see.
Even when you travel, you may not see how people live, how people talk, how people love.
I lived in Israel for three and a half years, and I never knew, never saw. I learned more from the movies.
When you live in a tiny world of yours, everything about you is too important. Too vital. Too scary.
But when you can expand the world your problems, your circumstances, your issues will be just a drop on the ocean.
Why is that important? Because if your stuff is too important, then you’ll be always unhappy. With yourself, with your life, with everything.
I found this out in a weird way.
A few years ago I started to go to a senior exercise class. It was mainly about preventing falls… seniors are so prone to.
So many of the exercises were about balancing on one foot. It is not easy so even the teacher would lose his balance occasionally.
When he did he laughed, and the seniors laughed with him. I didn’t. You see I considered mistakes nothing to laugh about.
Looking back I am pondering who that serious unforgiving b.i.t.c.h. was… but there you have it. I was like that.
I learned to laugh at my mistakes in that senior exercise class… giving up that mistakes are serious. Giving up that narrow visual field where a mistake occupies your whole world and you are screwed… unless you make no mistakes.
The visual field where if you did well, you passed. If you didn’t: you failed.
In that world I needed a lot of patience to allow the mistakes, the wrong, the imperfect, and felt magnanimous about myself… But I was really intolerant.
Not surprisingly I made a lot less money then…
Because living in the black and white world makes a lot of things, a lot of people wrong. And repels abundance… the wrong abundance, the wrong friends, the wrong love, the wrong this and the wrong that.
Thanks to that class leader laughing, I slowly left that black and white world.
Mistakes are not wrong. Whether they are inside or outside.
And the more you can allow them to be not-wrong, the less energy they will use from you, and the more energy you have left to do things, to love, to laugh, to learn, to grow.
I can now recognize myself in different characters in the series I watch, the characters that live in a black and white world, where there are right things and especially there are wrong things. Characters like that kill, maim, and suffer.
I have even started to read books from different cultures. Where people are tormented by those wrong things they need to avenge. Where people are abusing others, openly and feel entitled to do so. and where entire generations are trained to not talk to the police, or anyone else lest they are a grass… a snitch… a traitor.
Yeah, enlarge your world… or else.
In those foreign movies you can also see what and how people of different cultures eat.
Not like you… that is the first thing you see. And if they eat like you, and some will, they will get fat, unfit, and die early.
How you eat is not how your ancestors ate. This is true for probably all of us.
The longest living populations are some isolated communities (Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Loma Linda, California; Ikaria, Greece; and Sardinia, Italy.) who managed to live, eat like they have always eaten. But most of us go to supermarkets where you can buy everything, and eat anything in any season, because the food comes from either factories, or from other continents where the weather is opposite of yours.
Your body is used to it, just like the elephants got used to thinking of themselves as weaker than the stake they were tied to as a baby elephant.
But there is a way to eat, a diet, when to eat, what to eat, how to eat, that is a better fit for your body, better fit for your soul.
And even if you can only eat according to your perfect diet when you are free to do so, you are much better off.
Family, spouses, society is not friendly to you being different, eating different, and will want you to be like them, like everybody else. And you may be better off finding ways to do that and not do that at the same time. And have premeditated reasons why you don’t want to eat something… or you’ll have too much attention on what’s wrong with you…
The world doesn’t want you to be all you can be. Even if they are your family.
I was regularly beaten because I didn’t want to eat what I felt wasn’t good for me. When I finally gave in, I became fat and ill, while people in my family remained well and thin on the exact same diet.
You are, unfortunately, an individual with individual needs. Your needs are mostly what not to eat. When not to eat. What things not to eat together.
In this regard the world became worse… worse than it was before.
In the book 1984 what was the most painful part where individuality was squashed… and the main character was stripped of his individuality.
Fitting in is overrated. Most of your dreams are through not fitting in.
You have to decide for yourself if you want to fit in or if you want to stand out. You cannot have both. They are mutually exclusive futures.
If you want to have more energy, have less indigestion, less hunger, less pooping issues, less sleeplessness, less emotional issues, then you may want to give the muscletested food list a try… even if you can only have control over what you eat some of the time.
Until October 30, you can get me to muscletest the perfect food list for you with a hefty discount. Use coupon code WINTEROFF to pay $25 less.
Get your perfect food listyour eating style.
Sometimes what makes someone fat is that they eat food they don’t really like, out of economy, out of politeness, or to be trendy. Once they start eating only what tasted really good for them, they lose the access weight, and get only hungry when it is really time to eat.
I now rarely eat anything that I don’t really like. That doesn’t really taste good to me. And nowadays I mostly feel better. And by contrast, when I make a mistake, I feel like a sick dog. Like yesterday. I ate something that I didn’t really like… because I didn’t take the time to make something I really liked… And as a result, I was up half the night. Wasn’t worth it.
Of course, I can prepare the dishes I really like… Can you?
One last thing: it would be really smart of you to learn muscletesting. Even if you only get half as good at it as I am, you’ll be a happier person… Because you’ll be out of your mind and ask Source to talk, not your mind.
And to support you in this, the coupon WINTEROFF will work for this course as well. You’ll get $25 off on your first payment of four. You can start the course today just paying $5.
