Stop Feeding Your Soul Twinkies!

Disclaimer: This rant is a direct result of a conversation I was having with my friend, J, in the car the other day. An interesting side note here, J is the girl that most of my rants were bounced off of first. She is the catalyst for many of my self discoveries. This one in particular deserves a shout out to her as she put the concept way better than I could.

Do you feel unfulfilled? Like you’re missing out on something greater? I sure as hell do. I feel like I have been set here for some great purpose, some driving goal, that I have no clue how to pursue. It leaves me feeling dissatisfied, vacant, hollow, guilty. Sure, I have brief glimpses of glory where I feel like I’m on my path. But, I have a lot of times when I shove that void full of booze and bad decisions, and for awhile I forget the emptiness. Well, okay, in my case it is booze, bad decisions, and romance novels. Okay, okay, I really have been bad about the sitcoms lately too. It is just so easy to feel better about myself when I am focused on HIMYM and don’t have to think about the total lack of good I did that day.

If your body is what you eat. Your soul is what you do. It is like those people on the discovery show that eat fourteen cheeseburgers, and thirty-seven twinkies a day. They are consuming a ton of calories, but they are getting no nutrition. They feel the urge to consume more and more of the empty calories because they are so malnourished. They go on and on becoming unhealthier and unhealthier, craving more and more. I think our souls(spirits, minds, whatever you want to call the core part of us that is us) are like that too. When we don’t realize that we are feeding ourselves spiritual (I almost went with a soul food joke here) junk food we need to shove more and more of the sugary nutrition-less stuff into that void because we feel so empty. I feel like doing things good for the soul (giving of your time, loving something outside yourself, volunteering, telling the truth, wanting good for others because you genuinely want to see them happy, etc.) is like feeding your spiritual self a well balanced meal, while indulging in reality TV marathons so that you are so engrossed with the images on the TV that you don’t focus on anything else are like candy (mm, delicious, delicious soul candy). Sitcoms and reality TV might be funny, but they are like all indulgences. They should be used sparingly.  You realize the benefit of moderation with eating. You should see the carry over here too.

So get off your butt, stop feeding your soul Twinkies, and get a freaking multivitamin!

So what would be a multivitamin for your soul? I’m not sure yet. Maybe that is my overwhelming purpose. Perhaps by the end of this I’ll write a wonderful book called, “Soul food, and not the deep fried kind.” I think a good place to start is with the almost universally held belief that being a good person is a good thing. We should be nice, respectful, loving, caring individuals. As much fun as it is to watch pithy comeback slinging jerks and people who care more about tanning than their grandparents, do we really want those characters as role models? Whatever happened to the archetype of the good people who were rewarded for being good? Nope, not here, no way. They aren’t entertaining. We are filling ourselves full of the idea that you have to beat each other out by any means necessary to win. Lying, sneaking, back stabbing? Give that girl a medal!***SARCASM! Yeah, I disagree with that on a profound level. So, I think a good place to start is to simply try to be nice. Say thank you. Let someone enter the door before you. Be pleasant.

As I was driving the other day I was really struggling with what I could do to fill my own void (other than getting addicted to a certain reality show that reminds me of Cheetos for some strange, orange, reason) and I landed on the idea that I am going to try and do one nice thing a day, just to be nice. Believe what you will, in whatever semantics you may, I think that pouring out good energy begets good energy. Every little bit helps, right? So I am a few days in. Nothing I have done has been huge. I have not single handedly ended world hunger. I haven’t come up with a plan to end joblessness, or get medical care to people in third world countries. I have done things like: stopping to let a trucker drive before me, complimenting a stranger on her necklace, asking an elderly couple if they needed help carrying something, and dropping a can of green beans in the food drive box at the grocery store. None of those things was particularly hard, well I struggled with the compliment and offering of help. (How sad is it that I mentally fought the initial urge to be helpful/nice because I didn’t want to offend them?) But I think that they have all made a difference. Maybe I helped that trucker’s road rage, maybe I made that woman’s night and she then avoided the fight with her husband that she would have had in front of her kid who then would have taken a gun to class because of the pain at home. Hey, don’t judge. It doesn’t take much to change the world, one action can set a whole different course of events. One yes rather than a no changes the future. And maybe, just maybe, that can of green beans is helping a family fill their bodies with nutrition, even as it helped fill my soul with some too.

**Also, I realize that I harp on TV a lot. I’m sorry if I offend anyone with that, but if Snooki and Pauly D are the paradigms of what our culture holds as valuable I think we need a cultural reboot.