Positioned

Well, I’m excited! Food is costly, household supplies are costly, and pharmacy costs for aches, pains and such like another bill to pay. For February, I did my usual writing but with an eye to the depth of the writing. I am not wholly satisfied, but am still curious about what it means to go deeper not wider. For a couple of years now, I have been tracking my food expenditures. Not my going out to lunch or supper expenditures, but just the food I bring into my house. Slowly, I have been able to see a pattern emerge allowing me to create a spending plan for food. I am willing to set a spending plan, but a strict budget makes me want to run away and hide. My immediate plan was to learn about my spending. Impulse spending? Oops!  

David Cain on his blog, raptitude.com, started me thinking about the food inside my cupboards and refrigerator. I have prided myself on my ability to use my food well, making my own meals for work days and having easy access to soups and snacks. In general, cooking and enjoying all aspects of food has been a big plus. Growing it, preparing it and definitely eating it. Missing from the big picture was what the actual costs were to me - aside from the power bill. An organic result has been a plan that has emerged, a plan that deepens my habits of a lifetime. The plan? Using up the leftovers in more creative ways. Coming from a family and generation that were just meat and potatoes, I have learned to use spices to spice up my dishes, research what mixes and matches, listen to the gurus of food shows and use just a soupçon of courage in the kitchen.

How many times did I throw out a blackened and watery head of lettuce? How many times had I let my garlic sprout in the darkness of my own cupboard? How many spices have I had for years…..and for some let’s make that decades. Each one of those food items cost me financially. Tearing up the dollars would have been an anathema to me. I would have been horrified! But if I exchanged them for a head of lettuce, well, it was just logical to let it rot in my fridge and then throw it out. A kind of putting off of tearing up the dollars given to a grocery store. Granted I have been contributing to someone’s monthly pay cheque, benefits their employer provides and of course the store’s profit margin. In the meantime, my tiny profit margin slowly gets whittled away.

February has passed and I am pleased with my spending results. I am taking this ‘go deeper, not wider’ into as many areas of my life as possible. Closer than ever to retiring from my nursing career brings me closer to the beginning of a life completely foreign to me. Courage and bravery is called for more than ever. So for the month of March, I hope to see what I may already have designed for this new chapter. For this month’s blog, I have no specific theme but to explore in greater depth that frightening place a whole lot of folks have gone before, but one that I have never wished to explore.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. 

It cannot be chased without changing our thinking.”

~ Albert Einstein

**Please remember! March is Epilepsy month. Purple Day for Epilepsy is March 26 around the world and in your neighbourhood.