Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Milk & Honey

My husband and I went to the Whitney last Sunday (masked, timed, but yay, ART!).  It was great to just wander through and take it all in. I stopped to admire a piece that appeared to be hundreds of doll-house size white ceramic vessels, all different, in no particular order, in a multilevel glass case. I was admiring the display, the cunningly fashioned tiny vessels, the randomness of how they were gathered, and the sheer quantity of them when I noticed the title: “Milk & Honey.” It took me right back January, when I wrote about Ingrid Fetell Lee’s book, Joyful, and our biological drive for abundance. The Land of Milk and Honey, more, more, more.

Museum visit aside, at home, my husband is making me nuts. My husband’s doctor has put him on a six-food elimination diet for six weeks. Feeling (understandably) deprived, he’s been searching up all the myriad products he can eat. Who knew that Fairway has two aisles full of gluten-free items?  Now, my tiny kitchen is awash in gluten-free, dairy-free and nut-free products, eating up my limited space and disrupting my tightly controlled inventory system.

Then yesterday, I was reminded of something from when I was in 7th or 8th grade. My school went on a week-long ski trip to Frost Valley, where there were only three meals a day and no soda. I’d recently become obsessed by Tab (remember Tab?), so I tucked a six-pack in my suitcase. I’d planned one per day and one for the bus ride home. On Friday, when I reached for my allotted can, I realized one can was missing! When I found out that my good friend had given the can to our gym teacher (not my favorite person, she made me attempt cartwheels), I was so mad. My friend, reasonably, thought I was being ridiculous.

It dawned on me that there are really two kinds of people: People like my husband, whose response to deprivation is to gather or hoard; and people like me, whose response is to control, withhold, manage—whatever unflattering term you want to use. It really all comes down to the same thing. On some deep, primal level, we all fear there isn’t enough, and we’ve evolved various ways of coping. The thing is, many of our modern problems—fast food, landfills, clutter—are problems of too much, not too little. We’ve made it folks, we are in the Land of Milk, Honey & Amazon. I can stop controlling, and you, my dears, can stop shopping, storing, and shoring up for disaster.

I love my husband, and my clients—all of you wonderful, abundance people. It’s definitely way more fun to go out to dinner with my husband (soon!) than it is with me. But in the same way I need him, you all need me to remind you:  You have enough. You don’t need another box of gluten-free pasta, or another sweater.  Abandon that digital shopping cart and go see some art. It will fill you up in ways you didn’t even know you were hungry, and set your brain pinging like a pinball machine. And that is pretty darn joyful, if you ask me.