Sarah Wilson

Do your work, step back

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This is a nice bit of Tao reflection… especially for those of us who are very good at doing, but not at stopping. Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s … Read more

Tuesday eats: more gluten-free recipes!

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My mate Dee Coleman has launched a great recipe share site which has some good gluten-free ideas. You should check it out. (Also check out the link below to gluten-free breakfast joints…and add some of your own in the comments. We’ll get a guide going….)

Two things I like about Cook My Way

1.the recipes only call for a couple of ingredients and are listed loosely (in handfuls, splashes)

2.the culture of the site is very cute – Dee invites a few people over to her house every Monday and cooks up a big meal which they eat while brainstorming ideas for the site.

Dee’s website is for everyone to post and share their recipes. Here’s some gluten free ones.

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Gluten-free seeded bread

3 cups of gluten-free flour
1 tspn bicarb soda
1 tspn salt
1 cup sunflower seeds
1 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup poppy seeds
600 mls butter milk
3 tspns honey

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Steve Jobs on how to trust life will turn out fine

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Chances are you’ve seen this Stanford address by Steve Jobs. It’s attracted over 3 million views. I was just alerted to a bit in it where he talks about a philosophy he has for life turning out. For how his life turned out.

photo: Nike
Photo via Nike

Jobs dropped out of uni after six months, but hung around campus, bummed about, ate Hare Krishna food. But he’d listen in on a calligraphy class…because it looked beautiful and interesting. Which, I think, is classic scanner (as per yesterday’s post) behaviour. He learned about the different fonts – serif and san serif (as per yesterday’s post, I, too, am obsessed by typography, among other things).

And so,

“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, “ Jobs explained, “the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionately spaced ones. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

And this is his philosophy,

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Which could be seen as cheap spiritual-speak. But it’s not. It’s how it works. I often get asked how I got to be editor of Cosmo or host of MasterChef of whatever. I can trace back and connect dots. But at the time, I didn’t see the dots.

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possibly the most reassuring advice I’ve been given (sunday life)

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This week I realise I’m a scanner. Which is to say, I realise my chaotic, excited way of being, and all the dreams I juggle, makes sense!

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On Tuesday I got great news. All these years I’ve regarded the crazy array of careers I’ve dabbled in (restaurant reviewer, political speechwriter, TV dollybird, magazine editor and so on with no discernible theme), the disparate topics of interests displayed on my bookshelf (evolutionary biology to typography), and the endless hobbies I engage with, as signs of a weak, unfocused character. I’m a spray gun! A jack of too many trades and master of jack shit! A dilettante!

But Tuesday I was told I’m none of those things.

No, I’m a “scanner”.

New York-based author Barbara Sher, who coined the term, reckons I’m a classic case. A scanner, she tells me, is genetically wired to be fanatically interested in multiple things at once. “You love everything, right!” Well, yes. “But you get bored and go off on tangents! And you think it’s bad that you keep quitting things and moving on!” Yes, yes, I do! “Don’t! Have some fun with it instead!”

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can you capture what you stand for?

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I have to come up with a mission statement, a raison d’etre for something I’m working on (actually, it’s my blog). I’ve struggled to get clear. I keep trying to get “on top” of what I think my blog is about, to get a definitive bird’s eye view. My view. Your view (as a reader). My critics’ views.

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I’ve mentioned before that with starting a blog – and when doing many things these days – it’s nigh impossible to get a definitive perspective on things. Everything moves so damn fast. Blogging doesn’t know where it’s heading…so enter the fray and just be part of it. Join the current, and learn to swim as you go, was my advice (I grew my entire career this way!). All of life is like this. Frazzled. Slippery.

But there’s another element to this resulting fugginess.

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“I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel!”

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Hmmmm, I wonder how much I love this angle: bikes free chicks! My favourite (dead-set) tweeter Maria Popova alerted me to National Geographic‘s new book Wheels of Change: How The Bicycle Empowered Women.

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The advent of the bike “radically redefined the normative conventions of femininity”. For a start it got women straddling something, and not side-saddle. Then it got them moving. And active.

“From allowing young people to socialize without the chaperoning of clergymen and other merchants of morality to finally liberating women from the constraints of corsets and giant skirts (the “rational dress” pioneered by bike-riding women cut the weight of their undergarments to a “mere” 7 pounds), the velocipede made possible previously unthinkable actions and interactions that we now for granted to the point of forgetting the turbulence they once incited.”

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how little acts of non-conformity make life better (Sunday life)

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This week I do things at the wrong time

lee-pricePhoto by Lee Price

I take disproportionate delight from eating non-breakfast food at breakfast. This morning I ate mashed pumpkin with garlic. Sometimes I eat grilled sardines on lentils. Once I ate lamb chops.

In the comfortable, middle-class world I inhabit, such deviations feel like perverse acts of rebellion.  My grandmother, for 65 years, used to put out two Weet-bix in a bowl every night ready for breakfast in the morning. Bless Grandmother’s gentle soul, but my non-breakfasts say booyah to that!

Doing things at the right – or conventional – time can make sense. Turning up to weddings at the time specified by the bride and groom is always good. And getting your bikini line waxed is best done mid-afternoon, a week after your period, when the skin is least sensitive.

But this week I played with the idea that doing stuff when you’re not meant to is a tidy way to inject joy into life. At a purely pragmatic level doing things out of step with the masses is efficient. In the book Buy Ketchup In May And Fly At Noon, Marc Di Vincenzo makes the case for eating out at restaurants on Tuesdays

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achieving with excitement

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Ages ago I remember reading something by Leo Babauta about he’d given up goals. Instead he was achieving things with excitement.

when your hair stands on end...YOU'RE EXCITED
when your hair stands on end...YOU'RE EXCITED

I’ve never really made goals. As in, “by 2013 I’ll be married with three kids”. Or, “in six months I will have the corner office”. In part because I’m never that certain about what I want to achieve. But also I’m not motivated that way. Goals seem so rigid and external and require different coloured textas and butcher’s paper and….

Sitting down to write “a list” of defined outcomes for down the track seems so dreary and admin-y.

Sitting down to reflect – or write – on what I want my life to feel like – that’s more like it!

Leo arrived at a similar point and said he gets things done by using excitement to lead him. Once excited, he takes action – he acts on the excitement immediately. Then he shares it (talks about it, tweets it). Then acts again. Keeps the excitement going. Acts a bit more and behold a “goal” is reached. Writing down goals, he says, can make you excited. But it’s only one way. And it’s not what gets you to the goal. Excitement does.

Let me tell you a story.

About six years ago I imagined up a scenario where I’m living in a place up high in trees overlooking the ocean. Hot, coastal, slightly tropical. I felt myself being there and felt myself working from there. Last week I took a look at where I’m living now, up here in the Byron hinterland in a little shed/cottage, and realised I’d landed myself in that scenario – trees, view, hot etc.

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