Reading · Life Minded by Naomi the Nutritionist

I think there’s this false narrative around what it means to live a good life. I mean, obviously we know social media is full of everyone’s highlight reels, but I don’t know how aware we really are of how these highlight reels are tainting our idea of how everyone else is really spending their time.

The monthly photo dumps full of the brunches and the travel diaries and the fit checks and the date nights make it seem like we’re all filling every moment of our lives with interesting activities.

We’re not posting our chill Sunday afternoon on the couch munching on tortilla chips and watching reruns of Friends in between loads of laundry. We’re not setting our phones up to record ourselves washing the floors of our apartment. We’re not live-streaming the lunch break at our desk, eating last night’s dinner leftovers and making small talk with our coworkers that we kind of sort of like. We’re not photo-dumping the countless nights we spent staying in, without plans for the night, wondering if everyone else is out doing something that we’re missing out on. These aren’t the exciting, bold, wild, postable moments.

But I don’t think something needs to be exciting or bold or wild in order to be valuable enough to post about — or even valuable, point blank. I don’t think a good life is made up of only the big moments. I think it’s made up of the small, boring, mundane ones, too. And heck, not only “too”, but mostly.

And if you can’t learn to love the mundane, you will continue to be disappointed with what life has to offer.

I used to date this guy who would complain every time we cooked dinner together. He saw it as a chore. We were in university and both kind of just learning how to be adults. Cooking was part of that. And while chopping vegetables, every time, without fail, he would complain of how boring it was. Or he would just blunt the quality time with a hockey game or show on in the background. Upon asking him about this, he admitted that cooking felt like a waste of the little free time he had (we were busy university students after all). He said that he’d rather spend that valuable time doing something “actually fun.”

He actually said, “why would we waste our time cooking when we could just order food and have more time for more important things?” Like watching TV, apparently.

After hearing that, I remember feeling so disconnected from him. I realized in that moment how different we were as people — and this wasn’t something either of us could grow into. It was a fundamental difference in values and how we both show up in the world.

He saw cooking as a chore. I saw it as an opportunity for quality time and nourishment. He saw it as something to distract through. I saw it as something to remain present during.

I honestly love cooking. But also the cleaning up. And doing laundry, along with the folding, and the putting away, and all the tiny little micro-habits that make up my colourful little life.

I love walking under the cherry blossoms in the spring and noticing the bird sounds in the morning. I love staying in on a stormy day and watching the lightning from my window.

I love sitting on my balcony having my morning matcha before a packed schedule full of nutrition clients who have trusted me with their health.

I love walking around my neighbourhood on my lunch breaks. I love running down to the ocean and biking to the gym. Biking…god, I love biking (scroll down for a peek at my yellow 1970s bike that I am absolutely in love with).

I love grocery shopping, imagining I’m on a little quest to forage for food. I love picking out nourishing ingredients, coming home and putting on a nostalgic playlist or TV show, and making a meal from scratch.

I love browsing my favourite bookstore and finding something new to read. I love adding books to my Goodreads faster than I can actually get through them.

I love watering my plants and growing herbs on my balcony.

I love writing about my thoughts and creating a little corner of the internet where people like you feel like visiting.

I love all of it.

Maybe all those little things seem a little plain. Maybe they are. But that doesn’t mean they’re not part of a wonderful life.

The happiest people I know aren’t the ones who live in extravagance. They’re not the ones with private chefs and personal assistants. They’re not even necessarily the ones working remotely from Bali or taking big, aesthetic vacations. How many celebrities need to come clean about how money and fame didn’t solve any of their problems for us to believe that a full life isn’t necessarily found in the big, picture-worthy moments?

I think a full life is found in the small moments.

I think my generation values the appearance of a good life more than the actual creation of one. We’re the Instagram generation — we stopped printing photos for personal scrapbooks and instead, social media became our archive. It’s like proof of everything we’ve ever done. I struggle to delete old photos because it feels like literally deleting a part of my life.

I think the danger here is that it primes us to believe that valuable time comes from how “postable” it is. And I think people who hold these mindsets end up spiralling themselves into an unhappy life, because most of their time is spent yearning for more than they have. They spend more time pinning “travel aesthetic” Pinterest than they do actually enjoying what their life has to offer.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s immense value in having big goals. In fact, I encourage you to pursue your big business ideas and cross off bucket-list-worthy dreams and go on the crazy trip. You should do all of it, big or small.

You’re talking to a girl who traveled alone to Maui and jumped out of a plane with a stranger she met in a bar. You’re talking to a girl who literally owns her own business. You’re talking to a girl who moved away from her small town in Ontario to live alone in a big, west coast city. You’re talking to a girl who hiked Panorama Ridge and Garibaldi Lake in a day and a half. I’m not naive to chasing once-in-a-lifetime moments, and of course, posting about them.

But in between those moments, you can’t sit there thinking you’re wasting your life.

Life is made up of a lot more small, mundane moments than exciting ones. Are you really going to spend most of your life wishing you were somewhere else? Wishing you were getting it over with faster?

The mundane moments of life aren’t just something you should learn to tolerate. A true zest for life comes from actually finding joy in the boring moments. Eventually, they don’t feel so boring anymore.

I’d even argue that by practicing the art of loving the mundane, you cultivate the conditions for more joy to enter your life. And these slower moments give our brains the down time they need to rest, regulate, and truly be present.

For me, there’s no big creative idea without the deep clean of my apartment — I can’t be creative in a messy space. There’s no big exciting overnight hike without many boring days in the gym, training for it. There’s no once-in-a-lifetime trip to Hawaii without many mundane nights cooking dinner at home to save money for the travel.

The mundane moments set us up to be ready for the big ones. But even so, by practicing the art of presence, the mundane moments end up feeling just as good as the big ones.

You may have noticed I speak openly about my love life. How Taylor Swift of me. I really am a lover girl through and through. I relate to the world through the lens of being in (or out of) love. But to me, that extends well beyond romantic love. It encompasses all aspects of my life.

Last year, I went through some of the hardest months I’ve ever had. I fell out of romantic love, which ended up bleeding into every corner of my life. In that time, I lost my joy for the day-to-day things that used to bring me so much happiness. It cut much deeper than falling out of love with my ex.

I stopped cooking for the joy of it — my meals were made to just get me through my days.

I stopped reading books for fun — instead, I used TV to veg out and distract myself.

I stopped baking — instead, I just ate store-bought candy.

I stopped biking and drove my car everywhere instead. I stopped writing. I stopped creating.

Every day was a blur of eat, work, eat, exercise, eat, nap, socialize, sleep. I not only stopped loving the slow, mundane parts of my day — I forgot how to notice them altogether. And without those little moments, my world felt flat. Grey. Tasteless.

And now that that period of my life is far, far behind me, and I’ve made space for new chapters, I feel like I’m finally falling in love again. For anyone who’s been in love before, you know just how colourful it is.

I’m falling back in love with nutrition, the art of cooking, and the slowness of my days.

I have favourite meals again. I’m feeling creative in the kitchen and I’m enjoying experimenting with new recipes to share on my page again.

I have a routine (sort of). I know where things are. I have my favourite cafes to work in and my favourite tree to read a book under. I have a usual bike route to work and to my friend’s place around the corner.

I’m writing again. I feel the most creative I ever have. I feel happy. Like truly, truly content.

In the turbulence of last year, I spent a lot of time questioning whether Vancouver was my home anymore. I considered moving back to Ontario and starting over. I wasn’t sure, in the absence of the romantic love I had been nurturing for most of my 5 years here, whether or not I truly loved this city.

Now I know that I do. I’ve fallen back in love with my life here, along with everything it has to offer, even on the plainest of days. But if you ask me, my life isn’t plain at all.