Sarah Wilson

This week I happily and surely go sober.

You see, I’m the ambassador for FebFast, an initiative that invites Australians to go sober in February and raise money for a bunch of substance abuse charities.

If you want to join my FebFast team go to this link…here! The password is detoxme. We’re currently the leading team, so you might as well back a winner. My MasterChef crew have joined, as have a bunch of writer/magazine/actor mates. Stay tuned in February. They’ll be sharing their sober thoughts here.

It started when I attended this charity cocktail event.  It was a thoroughly ra-ra affair with much champagne flowing to keep conversation loose and women vertical (without the numbing effect of booze, I swear, we couldn’t stand as long as we do in heels). However, I wasn’t drinking.

When you don’t drink you confuse people.

This is a new addition to my blog – food I like. From time to time I’ll flag a new food/food discovery that does good things – ethically, environmentally and nutritionally, or just in a makes-me-happy-when-it-sets-off-a-salivary-explosion-in-my-very-being kinda way.

First up, is Loving Earth’s organic, raw chocolate (slogan: healthy, sustainable, fair). I eat it as a twice-a-week treat after lunch. It melts in your mouth and feels like a food stuff, not a guilty indulgence.

Just now I ate flaxseed tortilla chips with three anchovies drizzled – or is it draped? – over the top. And a cucumber. Which confirms the rumours: I’m an eccentric eater.

But one thing I’m rather conservative about, or at least consistent with, is my tea. Twice a day I make a pot of green “Queen Peony” tea in this teapot and drink it from this cup (cast your eyes below).

I bought the pot in New York 15 years ago; I love rubbing the little booby things. And I love that the frog makes no sense.

The cup and saucer, I found at the dump about 20 years ago (in Canberra, a company has scavenging rights at the main dump and on-sells cool stuff they find amidst the nappies and paddlepop wrapper; my housemate worked there and I got a discount!). And I’ve been obsessed with green tea for years (honestly, it gives a far more dignified jolt of energy than coffee, and it’s so good for balancing your digestion).

I find comfort in this ritual. I talked about this yesterday. I’m a bit obsessed by the value of ritual at the moment. I used to think I hated it. My mum always said I needed to tame my manic mind and restless legs with ritual and I’d tell her that sounded boring. But now I can see that it creates moments of special pause in your day. A retreat from haphazardness. And when you own it as your own, you can like yourself a bit for the quirkiness of it all.

Muriel Barbery picks up on this in her friggen amazingly astute and philosophically delicate novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. You can order it You Know Where. The main character sits down to tea:

“I know that tea is no minor beverage. When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a licence granted to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor…. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends…”

Ok, that’s enough typing for now.

…down at Bondi, a quick sand run and a float in the ocean, looking up at the sky and getting into the right mood for the day.

This has been my routine for years. I’ve watched one woman, in this time, get pregnant and – bounce back again – twice!! There’s the over-tanned older lady who sand shuffles in a bright bikini with a matching hat. She always matches. And waves. I feel her happinss as she shuffles past. There’s the Russian body builders whose veins bulge at the neck. Dr Chris Brown is a regular. The Bondi Rescue boys always sing out encouragement. I’ve even had two blind running dates (sweat, sand, lycra and a 6.30 rendez-vous…anyone else up for it?)

This is my community. When you have a routine, you can tap into a community.

Routine can also make life simple. Each morning I wear the same green shorts and this red hat (it’s about seven years old now). I don’t have to think about what I wear. I dress and run. I don’t have to think about what makes me happy. This routine does. I just gravitate to it each day and I start my day happy.

This morning I ran into these cheeky kids (Deb and Sammy). Eugene from Aquabumbs took the pic. If you go to his site you’ll also see my mate Stu, who’s in my ‘hood, too.

“It’s the people that you meet, when you’re walking in the street…”.

Are you seeing what you attract? (Before it smashes you in the face?)

This week I gravitate to the “Law of Attraction”…to see if it makes life better.

I’m what you might call a Third-Way Cherry-Picker. People tend to say, particularly when it comes to the new-agey stuff I discuss in this column, there are two types of people. Sceptics. And Folk Who Buy Into the Whole Package – the books, lecture series and the gift-boxed destiny cards.

But some of us tread a third way. We take on board the message, but do so with a grain (or barrow-load) of salt, cherry-picking the bits that make intuitive sense. We have a foot in both camps, smart enough to know no one can really manifest a Ferrari. And find it kind of gross anyone would try to.

I issue this preface because I’m about to describe how I’ve just attended a Law of Attraction workshop with Esther and Jerry Hicks. Haven’t seen The Secret? Well, the Hicks appear in it prominently, demonstrating how to attract what you want by simply thinking it. Like attracts like; nice thoughts attract nice things. And (just to fire up the sceptics) they do it by channelling a spirit collective known as Abraham. Weird. But then so are gated communities. And sleeve tattoos.

“Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.” Queen Victoria

Are you good in a disaster? When the proverbial hits the fan? Or during a tragedy?  I think I am.

At funerals I don’t fall to pieces. I’ve been in a few close-to-death experiences up glaciers and tumbling down mountains. During these times, my mind turns brutally focused and everything around me goes still and quiet and I get the job done.

I’m not a screamer. I attend to spiders and snakes in the house (you didn’t have them in yours growing up?).

And, actually, people like me like ourselves best in a crises. I think it’s the notion of rising to the occasion, having something to apply ourselves to. Being useful. It’s kind of primeval. How many occasions are there to truly be out on the edge, responding in undiluted, almost animalistic ways?

I even seek out drama to respond to. When my spirit feels stale, I’ll go for a mountain bike ride that scares me. Or a surf. It’s so I can cathartic-ise my bourgeois, suburban ennui.

In contrast, I find some day-to-day issues really hard to deal with. I always have. I can stand in the supermarket in front of toothpaste and honestly not be able to decide Aim or Colgate.

And it can make we want to cry.

So, you’ve all been emailing wanting to know the details of the 5-day juice detox I did, as written up in Sunday Life. OK, it’s called Schkinny Maninny, which is kind of a misleading name as it’s not really about losing weight…it’s about getting your system back to normal by consuming 6kg of fruit and veg each day…so you can lose weight in a sustained way. I found it great – the stuff is squeezed VERY early in the morning (from organic ingredients) and delivered to your door at about 6.30am (it can come to work or home). It runs Monday to Friday, so it doesn’t eat into your weekend.

So, this week, in my journey to find a better life, I outsource my eating.

Now, tell me if I have this right.  You’re feeling fat. No, it’s more than that. You feel stodged up and toxic and traffic has ground to a sluggish, cranky crawl down there. Grandma’s mince pies and sustained cheap champagne abuse has taken its fetid toll.  And now you’re obsessed with “getting back on track”, reforming your eating with a clean start. Accordingly, your head is swirling with a clusterf*ck of messages about food  – No more gluten? No eating after 6pm? Only carrot sticks for a week? You don’t know where to start or what you’re meant to eat any more. So you down a mince pie.

I’ve always found dieting depressing. I’ve never really been on one. Merely observing others wrestle with them gives me heart-sink. Ditto detoxing. Detoxing’s diet-lite, or dieting for those who fear dieting makes them look vain and affected. In principle, they’re useful. In practice, they do our heads in. I reckon (and I’ve mentioned this before) it’s because they’re limiting. They’re about saying no and holding back, which is antithetical to the spirit of human beingness.

But worse, they tend to leave us more obsessed about food than ever. Dieting and detoxing are all about finicky food rules and hyper-body consciousness and explaining to waiters you need the dressing on the side. You can’t fix a food fixation with more food. It’s like mending a wound by dragging the scab through gravel.

But all that said, this week I did a five-day detox, the details of which I post above. It was a juice/soup/almond milk program that ticked all the nutritional boxes (I had a nutritionist check it out). But – and here’s the rub – all the food was prepared for me, and then delivered to my door in a little esky, replete with daily nutritional updates, like “today your liver will be angry”. I didn’t have to do a thing.

This week I resolve to have a crap-tastic New Year

Stuck to my friend Katie W’s fridge is a list of New Year resolutions. From last year. At the top it reads, “Live life like you’re on holidays”. This concept – chipper-ly deluding yourself with a ”St Tropez at cocktail hour” vibe – has always appealed. Until Katie pointed out that the very fact she failed to keep this resolution has caused her untold self-flagellating angst each time she’s gone to grab milk for the past 12 months. That’s what resolutions do: they haunt. And make you feel deficient.

Now, as a relevant aside, this week marks six months of my seeking out a better life and writing about it in this column. One thing I’ve learnt along the way is that happiness is mostly about lowering expectations.