No B.S Friday: If you neglect nourishment, you’ll suffer.
If the organism is without nourishment, it dies.
That statement is fairly intuitive, right?
So how’s your nourishment going?
This is one of the things you have to learn as you get older. When you’re a child, your parents take care of your nourishment. They make sure you eat well, they make sure you have fun things to do. They get you out of bed and drive you to soccer on a Saturday morning.
Bless ‘em.
We don’t appreciate it at the time, but our parents are constantly nourishing us.
Then as young adults, we become responsible for our own nourishment, but it doesn’t really matter. We’re full of beans, full of life. We have energy to burn.
(When I think about the benders I used to pull in my twenties…)
If we neglect to nourish ourselves, it doesn’t really matter. We have large stores of life-force we can draw on, and life’s not too hard anyway.
But then something truly tragic happens.
We get older.
We get into middle age – into our mid to late 30s – and suddenly we don’t have those stores of youthful lifeforce to draw on anymore.
We got out for a bender and it takes us weeks to recover.
And life gets harder. There’s kids, there’s mortgages, there’s responsibilities.
It starts to drain us.
And the big tragedy I see, particularly with men, but I think it applies to everyone, is that we haven’t learnt how to properly nourish ourselves. We never had to learn and so we didn’t.
We actually don’t know how to recharge our batteries properly.
And with life drawing maximum charge out of our system, we quickly get run down. We quickly get burnt out.
So back to our question. How’s your nourishment going? Because without nourishment, the organism dies.
And so there’s a discipline here. We have to make sure that our energies are going into nourishing activities.
If we do a thing, and the thing results in us receiving nourishment, then there’s the potential for it to become a perpetual motion machine. We give energy, we receive energy, give, receive, give, receive.
Only problem is, most endeavours in the modern world aren’t that nourishing. Take work for example. For most people work demands a lot from them. There’s the time commitment, and the creativity, and the brain-work, and the navigation of complex social situations and the fragile egos in middle-management.
It takes a lot.
But for most of us, work gives very little back. Sure, there’s the pay packet, but beyond that, it’s not very nourishing, if at all.
It runs the battery dry.
And when you look around, there’s lot of non-nourishing activities in your life. Take social media for example. It demands your attention, and it works your emotions – you’re touched by this, outraged by that.
But it gives very little back. It’s not real connection, and so it’s not really nourishing.
And so as I get older, I realise I have to be very careful about the activities I engage in. I need to make sure that those activities set up virtuous energetic circle. That what I give comes back to me, and leaves me feeling nourished.
Sadly, the world doesn’t naturally give you endeavours like this, so you have to seek them out.
But the key thing to remember is that you need nourishment.
If you keep on with giving more than you receive, you’ll burn out eventually, I guarantee it.
JG.