Sarah Wilson

be gentle with your parents

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Reader Dani commented on the Rules of Life post I did a while back and pointed me to Marion Winik’s “Rules for the Unruly”.

Rule #5: be gentle with your parents.

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A reminder of much worth, I think. Our parents need our gentleness and we need the full, whole feeling that we get when we give it to them.

Part of the reason I can be rough and impatient with mine: I find it difficult watching my parents get older…and slower. It coincides with life speeding up beyond what most of us can deal with.  For their kids, the two paces – ours and theirs – often grate. When I see my parents I have to consciously slip into third gear. Otherwise I might just self-combust as they ask me again for directions to my house. Or bicker about who’s fault it was that mum’s glasses were left in the car.

It’s also…what’s the right word…. dispiriting (?) a reminder of our mortality (?) to see our parents become the vulnerable ones. They were always the authority. They knew shit. It’s hard to swap the roles. But the passing of the baton is really significant. I’ve been able to be far more gentle with mine since I’ve picked up the baton.

PS in the pic above Dad can’t follow the card game and does the same dumb move over and over. Or something like that.

PPS the pic below…when M and D were in their teens…D trying some dumb move on M.

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how quitting sugar made me nicer: Sunday Life

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This week I’m (still) quitting sugar

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Again, a quick note for readers of this blog who’ve been following my “I quit sugar” posts, this might seem like I’m repeating myself…I kinda did for my Sunday Life column readers. For those of you playing catch up on this topic, you can read other “I quit sugar” posts, like  my interview with David Gillespie here, the reasons why sugar makes us fat here, how I quit sugar here and some breakfast ideas here.

I quit sugar a few weeks back, to see if it made me a nicer, less cranky, agitated person, and wrote about it here in this column. I got a lot of feedback asking how I actually did it, so I thought I’d do a follow-up . I’m now able to report back from the sugar-free frontline that I’m doing OK. Many studies say it takes 21 days to overcome a habit. I’m over the hump. And the subsequent dip. And off the cranky, saccharin addicted rollercoaster for good, I reckon.

In the process, though, I’ve had to be really careful I didn’t become one of those bores who reads nutritional labels before accepting a potato crisp and who quotes guilt-inducing food factoids at dinner parties. As a colleague Nicole said, “I’d rather sit next to a funeral director than someone on a diet”. I don’t know, the last time I sat next to a dieter at a dinner I got to eat her leftover cheesy potatoes and the parson’s nose from her chicken (anyone else share my salivatory obsession with parson’s noses? No…?).

That said I couldn’t help myself and have been spurting startling “did you knows” all week. How about I share some of them with you now?

Did you know a glass of apple juice contains as much sugar as a glass of coke (about 10 teaspoons)? And did you know there’s more sugar in barbeque sauce (55 per cent sugar) than in chocolate topping?

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why I’m writing a book

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“Write the book that pulls you out of bed every night like a secret friend, waiting to be met.” I post this by way of follow-up from my previous post. It’s  from Australian author Louisa Deasey. Louisa – whose book Love and Other -Turns came out a few months back; I haven’t read it but … Read more

I was wondering if you could help me with my book?

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I’ve been writing my book for a bit. And since a few of you have kindly asked, it’s coming along well,  in fits and spurts. I’m not sure how many of you have written something as long as a book, but GOSH IT HURTS. It drags up very challenging aspects of one’s self that one has managed to keep nicely safeguarded by routine and distractions and working for other people.

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The biggest challenge I’m having is with my authenticity. Digging deep enough to be totally real. It’s easy to write stuff that’s clever or impressive or appealing to a particular audience that you might have conjured. Words can be wonderful cloaks.

I like this quote from J.D. Salinger about how he gets  in touch with his authenticity so he can write his best:

“It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work…Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more.”

Some days it takes me most of the day. Then I have I flourish of truth at around 4pm.

But to be square with you: The book is a sort-of-memoir, sort-of-philosophical reflection, sort-of-guide-to-getting-well.  But I want the book to reflect where we’re all at. I want it to be about stuff that we all connect with and connect through. And this is where I thought you might be interested in getting involved.

Can I ask for your help? I’d really appreciate it, if you had the time.

Would you mind simply sharing any thoughts prompted by any/all/one of the following questions:

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artificial sweeteners…are any ok?

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Honesty corner: I’ve been trying to cheat the system and find a way to eat sugar-free chocolate. A cup of tea and chocolate at 3pm. Real tea. Fake sugar… sadly it’s tougher than the idea suggests.

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I figured there had to be one out there that was OK.

The fake chocolate scenario:

  • Loving Earth chocolate  contains agave, which is 90 per cent fructose. Which is not what you want to be eating. Health food shops are awash with agave-sweetened, “sugar-free” products. Be very aware!
  • Cocoa Farm chocolate is sweetened with Maltitol which is one of the common sugar alcohols. More on them in a minute. But note, they’re bad.

So are any fake sugars OK? Yep.

  • Dextrose and glucose are both pure glucose, containing no fructose, so your body will detect it and process it.
  • The “maltos” – maltodextrin and maltodextrose. These are another variant of glucose, in a longer chain of molecules. When they hit your saliva, they break down to maltose, which is digested as if it were pure glucose.
  • Lactose – the sugar in milk products. Again, no fructose and surprisingly sweet once you’re off fructose.

This is a list, from David Gillespie’s “Sweet Poison Quit Plan“:

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Growing up in the 70s: what was it like for you?

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I’m a Gen Xer, a child of the 70s, and oh, don’t I just love to tell young folk how much better it was when I was a kid. I’ve reached that age. I came across an interview with Salon’s Heather Havrilesky. She’s just written a memoir, “Disaster Preparedness,” about being a child of the … Read more

vibram fivefingers…I’m a convert (Sunday life)

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This week I run in weird frog shoes

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I think it’s a particularly Australian thing to not want to appear too earnest when partaking in sporting pursuits. Blaring lyrca and customised sweats make you look like you care too much. Which is fine if you’re the best. But anything less? You’re a try-hard. I mean, what could be worse than being accused of having “all gear and no idea”?

For this week’s column I succumbed to trialing possibly the most earnest sporting accoutrement on the planet: Vibram FiveFingers, those odd little foot gloves made from rubber that allow you to run barefoot without getting glass or twig injuries. They were originally designed in Italy as a non-slip boating shoe, but a few years ago were adopted by the rather parochial and fast-growing barefoot running community. You might have seen such folk about at your gym, down at the park, running past you in a marathon. And you might have thought, “Cripes, what an earnest little frog-footed person he/she is!”.

Well, I’ve turned into just such a person. You know, it’s lucky I offloaded my pride long ago (shortly after I wrote about getting a colonic and just before tap-dancing out of a plane with Sir Richard Branson for this column). Adjusting to the FiveFingers takes a good few months and Australia’s Vibram importer Max Delacy from Barefoot Inc told me I must walk around in them as much as possible until my feet strengthened. I wore mine walking through the city to meetings, to the supermarket and into a pub when I had to drop something off to a friend. I got looks. But I held my head high.

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what if i can’t be the nerd anymore?

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Since I was four I’ve worn glasses. Before hipsters wore glasses, being a four-eyes wasn’t cool. It wasn’t like wearing braces. You were ostracized not so much for having a defect but for looking bookish and – god forbid – intelligent. At my bogan school it was rad to be slightly dim.

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I think I became a nerd from wearing glasses. I was never bookish, but spent a lot of time on my own in the library. It meant I had plenty of time for homework. Glasses also force a certain aesthetic upon you – a slightly awkward, intense, reflective one. I’ve worn it as a guise ever since.

But yesterday I was told I didn’t need glasses. I’m affronted. Threatened. I already feel naked. My ego is attached to being different via my glasses, bold enough to wear them, not-caring-enough about what others think. I wear big, brash glasses, unapologetically. This has become my stamp.

But when German vision trainer Leo Angart visited me he took one look at my eyes and told me glasses were not required. He identified my eye issues in one glance and said  that he could fix them with simple muscular exercises in….weeks, if not days!

I’m a four-eyes because I have:

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Tolstoy’s rules of life – what are yours?

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Leo Tolstoy was something of rigid, draconian, self-flagellating type.

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rule #7 find what makes you different from everyone else

He wrote these rules of life when he was 18:

  1. Get up early (five o’clock)
  2. Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)
  3. Eat little and avoid sweets
  4. Try to do everything by yourself
  5. Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for evry minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater
  6. Keep away from women
  7. Kill desire by work
  8. Be good, but try to let no one know it
  9. Always live less expensively than you might
  10. Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

(Thank you to Gretchen at The Happiness Project)

I like many of them. Not so much #6! I like the bottom three specifically. The bottom two even more so. I think living as simply as you can, regardless of income and wealth, is a rich way to live. Expensive stuff is annoying and complicated. And wanting “stuff”, reaching out for “things” externally is distracting and a recipe for an endless yearning that gnaws at you relentlessly. Upgrading never satisfies.

Some of my rules of life are:

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