Day: July 20, 2014

Often Chinese philosophies can be applied to other circumstances. One such circumstance is the Okinawa diet or hara hachi bu principle of healthy eating. The simplest way to describe this principle is as an 80% rule. You eat until you are 80% full, building your diet on vegetables, soy, and legumes and reducing the number of free radicals attacking your body. Basically, it is the principle of not maxing out and not poisoning yourself with what the world offers you easily. Incorporating this philosophy into your daily life is a wonderful way to change things for yourself emotionally and professionally as well.

I’m a case study for burnout. Every school year I push myself to the limit of what can be done. As such, everything that is done suffers from my being stretched thin. I’m overwhelmed vs. merely whelmed. If you work to 80% of capacity, you put yourself in a position to be able to do more, but to be doing enough that you’re not burning yourself out. Additionally, if you allow some of what you do to please the spirit (a spiritual vegetable if you will), then you create the opportunity to stay happy and grounded in your workspace.

This is just an outline of how to apple Hara Hachi Bu to your lifestyle. I scoured the internet to see if anyone else has come up with a plan built around this philosophy. I found this bit by Melanie Pinola from Lifehacker that dovetails nicely into the ideas outlined above. She talks about mindfulness and the work of author Justin Jackson. There are others who preach steps to mindfulness in the workplace. However, strategizing for a single place or condition isn’t really being mindful of yourself. It is operant conditioning at its worst.

Hara Hachi bu or whatever you adopt as part of your personal way of being has to be pervasive in your life. We are fragile creatures subject to breakdown largely because we do not allow ourselves the time and space for repairs. If we treated our things the way we treated ourselves it would be criminal. I’m slowly coming around to recognizing that I’m halfway through this one way journey and I still (if barely) have a chance to get my body and mind in a good place for the rest of the journey. It’d be silly to recognize that and then do nothing about it.

Some Thoughts:

1. At the end of the basketball season my 8-9 team took 4 losses against three wins. Here’s the kicker: We only lost to 2 teams. We beat every other team in the league, but the two teams we lost to only lost to each other. The 6-7 team completed a second straight undefeated year. There was a highly controversial tie born of a ref who called the game like it was a 4-5 contest and really let some stuff go down that set the kids’ learning back a season. The team that tied us is in for some hard lessons next year when none of what went down in our game will be allowed at the next level.
2. Having coached basketball for the first time, I see now what I need to work on in so far as skill development is concerned. My own skills are extremely limited, so I have a lot of learning to do. I will also need outside help to get the kids to perform at their optimal level.

The review began, ‘My grandson loved it and it made him happy for a while.’ I didn’t read any further because I knew what she was getting at. I’ve been there–live there, in truth–in this place where excitement fades quickly and what you are left with is the guilt of the purchase and a skein of disregarded plastic. As with fashion there will come a time when the old is new again, and you can scrape dust from the toys of last week so the children may revisit them today. This does little to address the new way of things: temporary. We live temporary lives in temporary houses using temporary things. We praise temporary, lauding Ikea over heirlooms. We fill our hunger for something good with something more.

Now things have seasons. We substitute the change of weather with the changing of our technology. Apple season is soon upon us. New devices will blow in with the fall winds, kicking up youthful excitement. I know more kids who gauge their lives by when the next big product or game is coming out than I know kids who can name one thing they built by hand. Even the school assignments come pre-fabbed from store bought kits and mom’s careful swirls of glue.

I am afraid that we’ve lost all sense of the value of hard work. We’ve settled into an acceptance of the new generational slogan and nodded and smiled at the old. ‘The Best Generation’ is long behind us, and ‘Work Smarter Not Harder’ rules the day. I’m afraid to trust my future to a generation built on microwavable meals and cellphones not expected to last a year before the new model comes out. On the one hand, they won’t settle for old, but on the other hand, they’d rather wait for someone else to build the new and meanwhile we slip further and further away from questioning until the thoughts of ‘why are we here on this planet’ fade into the rustle of windswept leaves.