Kitchen Medicine

There's a pot of chicken broth on the stove.

The world always feels better to me when I close my eyes and breathe in the smell. Just hours from now, that beautiful and delicious golden liquid will be ready to drink. Or to use as a base for another kind of soup. It's kitchen medicine.

A funny thing happens when you start thinking every day about your own happiness. Cracks begin to appear where once there had been a thin veneer of satisfaction. You do some mental gymnastics to try to spackle the cracks and paint over them, but eventually they show up again and can't be ignored. 

Awareness, once invited, will not be denied.

I look around and see the places in my life where I have been throwing slipcovers over things. I notice the things that cause me weariness. I notice the places where I have been using self-talk to avoid taking action. Eventually a pile of things is going to fall over, no matter how well you've stacked them.

I'm three weeks in. There are two and half months to go. I'm going to have to start moving some pieces around or out. My travel schedule lately and the recycling teach me something through noticing.

Our borough sends the recycling trucks around once a week. Here, it's on Thursday. The last two Thursdays I've been traveling, short trips. The week before we had storms and heavy rainfall on Thursday. So, there's three weeks of kitchen recycling in Trader Joe's bags in my kitchen and the two boxes my new chairs came in near the front door. There's a large, clear plastic bag filled with paper shreds, and probably a few Trader Joe's bags filled with newspapers and old magazines and catalogues. 

That's a lot for a tiny apartment.

And, it's Monday. 

So here's what I'm going to do. I've gathered it all up to the front room. I'm going to go down and move my car from the carport to the driveway and I'm going to get it all downstairs and out the door, stack it neatly in a space that will stage it for going out easily on Wednesday night. And while I'm at it, I'm going to drive a chair I no longer use over to the Salvation Army and give it away - let it be a blessing for someone else. I could probably sell it, but that feels like a lot of work, and I just want to let things go while I have the energy and the will to do it. That will create space for other things, perhaps even just to see clearly and move more freely. 

I've made a list and I'm checking things off. Then I'm going to come home and sip that beautiful broth. 

A Hundred Days of Happiness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonder. She asks big questions of the small things in life.