You know the adage, “the best things in life are free…” Well, while they may not be entirely free, I’m starting to realise many things in life that are good for you, need not be expensive.
If you have been eating out, you must have realised inflation nowadays is really steep. Food court prices have risen to almost $10 a meal, and breakfasts outside are often more than $5 now. How to keep up with these prices if our salaries are not rising astronomically as well?
However, thanks to stumbling over a really good book in the library called
The Healthiest Diet on the Planet", plus some ruminating and time spent making stuff, I recently discovered these amazing insights and truths:
- Eating meats is actually poisoning your bodies as animals nowadays are pumped full of hormones, antibodies, chemicals, and tend to consume foods they are not meant to eat (think mad cow disease but less extreme). They are also grown in cramped, inhumane conditions and I don’t think they have happy lives, which makes one wonder if their meat is also full of stress and "misery" hormones and chemicals as well. I remember reading a book called ‘The Secret Life of Plants’, which showed a wide-eyed me as a teenager that actually sending happy thoughts to a plant makes it grow better (what every person with green thumbs inherently knows) and can even keep it alive when the leaf is cut and left on a dresser! And that if you freeze water in cups labeled nasty words, the ice crystals are all chaotic and disorderly. On the contrary, when you freeze water in cups labelled with lovely words, the ice structure viewed under the microscope was crystalline and symmetrical. So, for animals bred under miserable conditions, you can infer for yourselves what types of chemicals and disorderly structures may be in the meat. It is due to our bodies’ amazing continual powers of self-healing that causes us to stay healthy despite what we put in our bodies.
- This also goes for milk, cheese and eggs. Maybe unless you go for free range. So that seems to eliminate most of the costly things we tend to buy from the market and also many fancy food products are eliminated.
- What is left to eat? Grains (wheat, rice, oats, barley), beans, vegetables, fruits and nuts. Even oils are not really necessary for us unless we are doing lots of manual labour or lacking carbs and really need the calories. As I tend to spend a fair bit on olive oil, and thinking it is healthy, use it quite liberally when cooking (e.g. for aglio olio pasta), this caused me to do a double take. I guess if I cut down on use of oils to the bare necessity to prevent foods from sticking to the wok or pan, it could save me money too!
- Then I realised, if I don’t buy so much meat, fish, eggs and cheeses (and we all know the prices of these items are going up), then I can spend my money buying the costlier brown rice or even multi-grain rice (which looks so nice when cooked), more kinds of seeds (e.g. sesame seeds) to flavour our dishes, nuts to munch on (nut mixes are also not that cheap), pricier vegetables and fruits of more varieties. And also, let’s face it, beans are cheap. I realised this is a great way to save money and become healthier as well!
- I became quite excited as instead of buying expensive bakery buns every morning, I could make my own wholemeal sandwiches with boiled sweet potatoes, homemade hummus, and even boiled frozen corn, mayonnaise and cheese (ok I think cheese will be hard to kick off in my diet). I could also try my hand at making cooked oatmeal with dates which my mum made for me every day of my confinement which helped me go quite regularly despite a strict diet of mostly brown rice, ginger and liver or kidney the first 3 weeks.
- Another good way to help your pocket and your health is by fasting. I realised fasting does wonders for your digestive health, and constantly eating actually stresses it out. What an interesting fact! Maybe I should fast tomorrow lunch (since I seem to have a tight schedule anyway) and see where it leads me. I would like to meditate a bit more on Christ too on this long Good Friday/Easter weekend. I mean, what better way to save on meals right!
- Another thing we often spend money on, aside from food, is entertainment. This is when I had another insight from making something I could not find in a shop. One day, while looking through the soul-numbing, seemingly endless announcements and instructions from Parents Gateway, and writing down more and more dates for my 3 kids who are all in Primary school, I decided I needed a desktop calendar, to keep track of all the weighted and non-weighted assessment dates, camp dates, e-learning and meet-the-parent dates, just to name a few. Writing them down in my bullet journal which I flipped open every few weeks was not going to cut it - I needed the kind that is big and flat and that you can put up on a wall or lay flat on your desk so you can see the whole month at a glance. But when I went to Popular I found out to my dismay that they stop stocking them from March. So I had no choice but to make one myself using drawing block, which I thankfully had lying around. It took me almost 2 hours to draw up the calendar just for the month of April, including measuring out and drawing the tables, lettering in April and designing little flowers to go with it, and then finally writing in all the dates and milestones. I kept thinking to myself I could have done it so much faster had I bought a calendar, but strangely, when I looked at the end result, it is like a maker looking at a doll he created, the experience is oddly intimate and satisfying, partly because I had spent just so much time doing it up, it was like part of me was in this product! I just feel a thrill of joy looking at it, not unlike how amidst a busy day, I find myself irresistibly sometimes clicking my sent mail just to reread emails I had earlier sent out, for the sheer pleasure of reading my writing, haha!
- Another deep insight I had was, I recalled when watching or reading survival stories like Hatchet, similar books by Gary Paulsen, or The Mountain Between Us, one marvels at how little a person can have or needs in terms of possessions, it's really the other extreme. And when you have nothing but what you can find in nature, you will not waste one little man-made material (e.g. packaging from a crate), but keep it for future use. Yet we are surrounded by such a vast abundance of things. We throw and buy and buy and throw. It’s a vicious cycle and a bit insane. We do it without thinking, and our homes are so overflowing with things sometimes it clutters our eye and our soul, and we struggle to put things away every day. I suppose if we were very poor, we might live a bit like the boy in Hatchet, making the most of things he had and being resourceful and innovative. In fact, at the end of the book, he often escaped to the wilderness, with just a few things.
- I sometimes think a life with fewer choices, a straightforward simple life, may actually be nicer. Not having an abundance of choices of things to eat, things to wear, things to do, may free up our minds to focus on the things that really matter, like what we are called to do, and relationships. I shall not forget that one night when I spent it having a farewell dinner for my CEO (quite a marvellous man) and in the company of 20+ senior management people having a nice Chinese dinner… I went home feeling light and happy and energised (could be all that good and strong Chinese tea too) and I could power up my computer and do a lot of work after that. I felt it was very different from how I feel after a movie night, when I don’t feel like doing more work, and my mind is also more tired and dulled. I realised spending time with good company really does wonders for your mood and your body and your soul. That is why I think occasionally, we should arrange to spend time in the company of good friends, over a good meal or something. And if we lack good friends, to make the effort to arrange for these socials and gatherings, even if they seem awkward at first. The song is true, "the more we get together, together together...." Even Bill Gates said, the best advice he ever got was to have good relationships and friendships in life.
- I also realised the things which make me really happy are: 1) writing well and clearly (stumbling on that book Clearly Write by Lim Soo Ping made me so happy in Popular! I was reading it and chuckling gleefully to myself reading those examples of bad writing that are so rampant in civil service), 2) making things (like the Bullet Journal, cards, calendars, and like Hatchet, you could probably make many things you need in life since we have such an abundance of "stuff"), 3) cooking (ah that mysterious elixir, alchemy of creating something delicious and heart-warming out of simple raw ingredients) and 4) being with others, especially good company where we talk and trade jokes and life experiences and have a laugh (like that lunch with CK and ME, somehow we all like to joke and/or laugh - like that funny moment where I commented that it was very unlike my my organisation for people to fight one another to take up something, and when I mimicked people saying "no, let me do it" we really cracked up cos it was so ludicrous). And like my mum, I really like being in greenery (and Singapore does have plentiful parks and park connectors to wander around and get lost in) and puttering around doing my amateurish gardening too (next up, maybe it's time to grow some lady's finger plants again since the last batch died). Actually none of these cost a lot of money, except maybe to hang out with people you need to eat somewhere and possibly at nicer places. So there. My simple life.
