Tag: health

Tranquility

In our fortunate era, one can do many things, play many roles, in fact be different persons over time. We recognize standard stages of life – childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle-aged, senior, elder – and the various career changes one can make. But our very being can also transmute .

Tranquility is not a revered goal of our culture. It’s more important to be upset, to strive, to be unsatisfied with what is and work to change things for the better. For most of those stages of life, being tranquil is dangerously close to being a lazy good for nothing .

But elders _ well, little is expected at this declining energies and thoughts. Attempts by old folks to do great things is at best comical and at worst annoying and tragic. Tranquility fits those who otherwise get in the way of progress .

I confess to buying into this somewhat. Ever since I read  Innocents Abroad as a boy, I realized that younger people who accept life however awful it may be are more to be pitied than envied. I hardly ever sought tranquility, preferring even painful activity to doing nothing .

But now? I’m afraid I am still not quite tranquil, although I have slowed, appreciate the moments, and try not to regret all the many things I can no longer do. Such acceptance, I suppose, is close to tranquility. Or laziness, of course. 

Ultra Hyped

A current bugaboo is worry about “ultra processed” foods. On examination, this label turns out to mean to have about as much meaning as anything with “turbo” in the description. “Ultra” used to be defined pretty synonymously with “extreme” or even a little more extreme than regular old extreme. But this connotation has apparently eroded just as much as the other older term, simply slapped on headlines and attention seeking studies to grab interest by shouting about new worries .

” Ultra processed food” is a perfect case in point. On a normal dial indicating, for example, speed, the indicator would range from stop through slow, moderate, fast, to insanely fast or ultra. But the equivalent food dial would label everything under 10 or 15 mph as okay and anything above as “horribly fast.” A fairly useless guide .

So now “ultra” is being slapped on everything bad in the same way “new, improved” used to be attached to anything good. I’m aware that word meanings and especially connotations mutate frequently, so there is little to really get annoyed at. It’s the ridiculously set binary division that is truly crazy .

I will continue to use my own food dial which runs approximately from raw, prepared, lightly processed, heavily processed and – yes – ultra processed. And not to be too worried about occasionally enjoying the “worst” which are – after all _ sometimes very delicious and many of which whole populations have been eating for decades .