What a beautiful word. Nourish. I think of all the possible permutations in sound. Now Rich, if you have a lisp. New Rich, as well. Now Rise, if you want to pronounce it differently. The words all carry the same meaning. I read this in the morning and I thought I should nourish myself.
I meditated for 25 minutes, a far cry from the one hour I used to do easily. These days, my mind is all a mess. I worked out for 50 minutes, a grueling Chest and Triceps workout. I wrote my blog post for the day. I didn’t do much work. I sent a few marketing queries, answered a customer, and then watched a lot of episodes of “Game of Thrones.” Yes, I finally succumbed to the rage and now find myself grudgingly accepting that there is something to this world of fantasy, after all. I read a little. I went for a movie with my sister where I had popcorn and ice cream. I came back and applied a Dead Sea face mask I had bought in Jordan a few years ago.
I didn’t speak to any friend but chatted with a few. I saw a beautiful message on What’s App from a friend who assured me that I wasn’t the ***hole I sometimes think I am. “You are being hard on yourself when you say that you are not happy with some of the things you did. Because when we hurt inside, it is hard to tell what is the right thing to do and how to react.” I had tears in my eyes when I read that.
I ended the night reading Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” before surrendering to sleep before 11 PM. This was a typical yet non-typical day for me. Did I nourish my soul? I didn’t have a cup of tea the whole day. I was not focused enough on anything I did. I wanted to live more, to suck deeply of the marrow of life as Thoreau wrote in Walden. I have too many castles. I now need to nourish the foundations for those.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
