by Hot Coco

As mentioned yesterday, my mantra for this week is to eat more.  Today, I began doing exactly that.  Now, as I write this at 10:00pm, my final food intake is one graham cracker with one tablespoon peanut butter, washed down by more water - but not too much this close to bed time!

Once I eat this snack, I will have consumed 48 of my 49 points, and I'm going to consider that to be a mission accomplished for today.  Those 40 peanuts for my mid-morning snack helped a lot to keep me on track.

I made a rhyme. :-)

In the midst of walking the path to health, I've been walking the path of purging.  I have been giving things away left and right for the last couple weeks:  books, picture frames, knick-knacks, side tables, TV.  That's right; I gave away my TV.

It happened like this:  back at the end of May I turned my cable TV service off in order to save money; a side effect of being unemployed.  Even though service was officially suspended, I still had a local feed which enabled me to watch local stations; Good Morning America while I ate breakfast; Wheel of Fortune while I ate supper.  A week ago Wednesday, my former cable TV provider audited the area and so suspended that local feed, too.  Hello, white noise and static.

Within a couple hours of observing the provider's van exiting my driveway, I offered up my TV on the local FreeCycle group.  A couple hours after that, it was picked up by a grateful family.

The reason for me taking that action, aside from the obvious of having no programming to watch on it, was knowing seeing it there, on its cabinet, useless, would drive me bonkers; it would catapult me into a suck hole of lack.  I did not need that.  I did not want that.  The TV had to go, and so it went.

No TV. A stereo rarely used (and an extension cord needing to be moved).

Tonight, for the first time, I started sliding into that suck hole.  I was looking at my evening as a yawning, black abyss without something to visually anesthetize me.  I put the radio onto a music station, as I've been doing, and sat with that feeling.  It didn't pass.  It began to escalate; the slope got steeper.

Guess what?  It didn't kill me.  Guess what else?  I ended up calling my Dad  and talking to him for an hour.  Now, guess what else?  I'm no longer sliding into the suck hole.  The suck hole went away, as it does when it's faced openly.

That suck hole - a manifestation of a large box that greedily used and manipulated energy, and represents a soft addiction for me - will certainly return for an unwelcome visit when I'm least expecting it.  My intent is, it's stay will become both less frequent and less prolonged.
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Questions:
1. What do you do when you're sliding into the suck hole?
2. Would you - could you - give away your TV?