Vinegar and a new motto
For the last year or two I've been gradually trying to detox our house and beauty products in a consistent way. Replacing potentially environmentally, or human, harsh products with commercially available or home-made friendlier alternatives. Home-made is definitely where I'm happiest in principle - because of the economics, the reduction in packaging impact and the control. It is also where I find it hardest to get to in practice. Gathering ingredients and then taking the time to make something in sync with when a product needs replacing has been more than I've had energy for so often. Particularly because I often get stuck in the research phase: reading the books, the articles, pinning all the pins. I want to take advantage of the shared experience to try and get things 'right' and yet the more I read, often the more complicated I make something essentially simple.
Like my weekend shampoo and rinse - just dilute castille soap to shampoo with and dilute vinegar to rinse. There are approximately seventy two billion blog articles about this and a whole raft of variations on this theme and I think I have read most of them trying somehow to think out if it would be for me. Given I have had the ingredients on hand for months it really was getting slightly idiotic to not just try it. My hair was not going to fall out, the worst that might happen was that I might look and smell like I'd just finished a shift at the chip shop.
Preparing for perfection is somewhere I often get stuck in the non-essentials of life. In the must get done to get paid/fed/to bed essentials I've found a not very cordial entente that allows me to look like a functional being whilst generally feeling a bit dissatisfied with what I'm getting done. I've lived for too long with 'do your best' as a guiding rule. The insidious demands I create from those three little words that can never be lived up to have gradually become clearer over the years with a particularly enlightening CBT session last week finally making me face that it needed to go. I know these deep imbedded rules are buggers to rewire around as our minds are so attached to them, the pathways burned deep through the brain and there will be tricks to try and keep it in place as my mind fears the coming change.
In trying to release it I stumbled upon a realisation that as much as I might feel like I can never do enough preparation, never consider a situation from every angle and always reflect on what else I could have done - do your best is basically a limitation, a hastily drawn estimate of what I think I might be capable of, a line in the sand at which I can justify giving up on something or having a go whatever the consequences.
So I'm easing away from it - not by doing my best to ignore it, my best to collect evidence of why something is good enough or my best to be pleased with what I have achieved but by feeling my way. Just considering what each next step feels like - be it some research, an experiment or a blog post about vinegar. It's not about measuring up to anything, it's about relieving my mind of the job of running my life because it's not the right job for it. As the awesome Lisa Esile says "Letting your mind rule your life is like asking your inner eight year old to organize the next presidential campaign; she doesn’t know how and spends most of her time trying to look good in front of her friends."
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