The Parable of my chocolate chip cookie..

                                                   

                                                                                                        

As Labor Day approaches and our summer habits wane we naturally begin to remember what our elementary school teachers asked upon our return to school..."Did you have fun this summer?" By middle school it was more like " How did you stay busy this summer?", and by the time we hit high school summer was pretty much a distant memory. Now, in my retirement years I find that I look at my summer and pretty much all of my seasons a bit differently, kind of like how I look at my weekends...but in all of my reflections of the passing of my time I realized it was not so much where I went but more about who I was with and what WE did so here you go,  this is what I did on my retirement summer vacation...

Folks close to me know how my every morning begins, before my workout but after I stretch, I make a cup of coffee or sometimes it's a cup of tea and reach for 1 chocolate chip cookie. Not 2 or 3 but 1 cookie. My cookie has not lived in a box nor has it been mass produced. Some are lovingly made by family and friends while others are viewed in quaint town bakery windows. My quest to find my special CC Cookie this summer has taken me to Mom and Pop shops, Saturday morning farmers markets, amazing bakeries, restaurant dessert menus, familiar kitchens and places hidden in the southern borders of Canada, the coastal currents of eastern Maine and back to my familiar western Carolina mountains.  My CC cookie is not thin nor crispy, it has some density (cozy middle) and tends to be topped by either round morsels of  chocolate chips or boldly buried dark chocolate chunks. I am only having 1 each morning so I keep the bar high. My circle of people tease me, some even call me a chocolate chipophile, (one who loves the item). They ask me how I eat just 1 cookie every single morning and having given this much thought through my summer retirement, this is my story in answer to that question.

When I finally fully retired the gift I gave to myself consisted of no alarm clocks, little to no workouts and no more meetings.  It took me some time to settle into this new rhythm but over time I surely did enjoy the furlough of required activity and easily replaced them with leisurely gatherings of pairing foods and wines for friends and family.  We enjoyed the planning, the prepping, the cooking and sharing of it all and so did those who shared our table. Months gathered into years and the passage of time flew much like our seasons. Being an introspective person I began to realize that maybe I wasn't loving this rhythm of my retirement life. The gifts I gave myself upon retirement I don't think were meant to last forever, I think too much of a good thing can have the opposite outcome overtime and so I dug into the changes I could feel and see in myself and had to finally admit that what I had actually done was that I had removed something from my life that was vital, not only to my mental and physical wellness but to my overall quality of living...  discipline!  I had gradually turned myself into a fairly inactive (a few rounds of golf now and then didn't count nor did a bit of yard work), undisciplined person. No wonder I was feeling void of something, this was not the me I knew, the me I had worked to be.  Discipline has always been a solid structure in my life...going to work, regular workouts, working towards physical fitness (fighting the battle of the bulge) and on and on it goes.  I realized that when I removed these areas of discipline in my life I had negative outcomes.  Call it discipline, call it habits, by any name there is an outcome. When I  choose not to engage or to engage, good things happen or some not so good things happen...

Since I knew what I was missing getting it back into my life was a whole lot more difficult than letting it leave it.

Discipline, any kind of discipline is hard, that's why it's so easy to not do it. Humankind fails frequently and repeatedly, sometimes but not all the time when discipline is required...brushing our teeth is not so hard, moderating our consumption is more difficult. The spectrum of difficulty regarding discipline is far and wide. I have successes and failures...the important thing to me is that I keep trying. My life without discipline is perceived, by me, as a lazy life...that is not how I want to see myself. That is not how I want to be to those I love and to those who love me, it's not my best me! I began to acknowledge all my daily life choices as acts of self discipline and overtime, with this awareness I was adding more positive outcome discipline choices in my life and in so doing I found the hard of getting started, of doing the hard thing was becoming a bit easier.  Are there times in the morning when I would rather not get dressed and go out and start my fitness walk and routine, are there times when I would like to eat that golden southern fried chicken, are there times I would rather not cook and deliver that meal to someone in need, are there times I would rather send an email of thanks instead of an old fashion snail mail thank you note, for sure, it's hard, discipline is hard,  but I do it because I value what discipline gives back to me.

So...would I love to eat more than my 1 delicious chocolate chip cookie, for sure but it is my prize, my trophy, my reward for working hard to put discipline back into my life.