Belated Taking Stock of the Month: April

In the fracas of the last few weeks, I didn't have the opportunity to say many goodbyes in Switzerland. I have happily been given that opportunity through an invitation to stay in Karen's home for a few days before making the final journey back down to Narbonne with the last of my things. So I've been decompressing in Grandvaux, a village not far from my (now former) home of Chexbres, and today I head back down to Narbonne. It's been really nice to be able to spend a few days saying farewell to the people and places that have made up my life over the last year, without feeling like my head is going to explode with all the things I need to remember to do to organize my move. I've been sleeping in, getting in some gentle runs in the vineyards and lunching with friends who I'll miss terribly but who promise to visit and I think they might just mean it (one of the benefits to living in the south of France).

With the first few days of May behind me, I can reflect on the month of April with a certain degree of detachment that is allowing for some objectivity and just a little bit of insight; the kind of insight that arises with hindsight but that you wish you’d had the faculty for at the time. So in no particular order, here are my insights from the month of April:

1. I tend to ask the world of myself and others.

2. I can be hard on myself.

3. There does not have to be any rhythm or reason for calamity; or put more colloquially, **** happens.

My last post described a little bit of how it hit the fan in the last week of April, but it was certainly an incomplete account of the variety of mishaps and unforeseen complications and pressures that converged to create an experience unlike any I’ve had before or wish to have again. I didn’t mention that this was a particularly high-pressure month for me at work, and at a certain point my manager and I agreed that taking a few sick days (read: mental health days) would be a good idea for everyone concerned. That happened right about the time that my laptop, my window to work in my Vancouver office, was starting to fry, my Swiss cell phone ran out of credit while in France and their website went down so that I couldn’t recharge it, the van rental company couldn’t reach me by phone so they sent me an email to tell me that my credit card was being declined, and that by the way, the charge was three times what I had expected because I did the math on the extra kilometers incorrectly, and I couldn’t make sense of what my new landlady was telling me I had to do to get my gas connected: it was either that I should stay home because she had made an appointment for the plumber to come and do it, or I had to call the plumber and make an appointment for him to come and do it, or I should go to the gas office to make the appointment for the plumber to come (and I still haven’t figure it out, but I do have an appointment at the gas office for when I return, which will hopefully result in someone connecting me).

Somewhere around this particular point, right after I got my phone working and Michael called to say that someone had crashed into the van on his way back to Lausanne, I noticed that I began to ask myself a disempowering and ultimately useless question: why is this happening? When a series of things go wrong that are seemingly unrelated and totally random, it’s hard not to begin to think along the lines of: what did I do to deserve this? Is this a test? If it is a test, who is administering it and what is the pass mark? I’m a painstakingly organized person, I’m a good planner, I understand that the devil is in the details and I build contingencies into my plans and can generally adapt to rapidly changing rules; how can this be happening to me?

None of which, of course, is useful, and all of which was an attempt to do what we cannot help doing every single day: assign causality to events in an attempt to cognitively organize our worlds. I don't know if I recognized this at the time or not, but I did somehow have the wherewithal to make the decision to focus my thoughts on a better question: what can I do in the next hour that will move me forward towards my desired objective? That became further distilled into: what can I do in the next ten minutes that will move me forward?

And this somehow got me through it.

And I somehow did it on a vegan diet.

And I’m going to stop being hard on myself for the abandoned training plans and abandoned objective to lean out. So here’s what I did accomplish in April:

- 33 hrs of riding
- 6 hours of running
- 30 minutes of swimming
- some serious heavy lifting of boxes

And to finish my round up of the month, we move on to my favourite bit to reflect on: recipe of the month. For those who think it would be insane if I had actually been experimenting with vegan recipes over the last four weeks, you would be absolutely right. April’s recipe of the month is less of a recipe and more of an adaptation of a favourite standby which, in under three minutes, can be slapped together when everything else feels like it’s falling apart:

Peanut Butter and Apple Sandwich

Spread organic peanut butter on one side of two slices of thick cut whole-wheat bread, add thinly sliced apple slices inbetween, ensuring that the peanut butter covers the apple surfaces to avoid oxidation. Pack in a ziplock bag for a bomb-proof vegan sandwich which can be squished at the bottom of a bag, left unrefrigerated for a long period of time, rediscovered later and still taste good with black coffee at a road side stop.

Now it’s time to turn the page on the next chapter. A few more words from my favourite small bear:

“Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other was the left, but he never could remember how to begin”

I know exactly what he means; and I think I'm close to figuring it out.