chasing sunlight: when the only constant is motion
016 | Hue's Cues: your weekly dose of inspiration and insights for your brain, mind, body, and soul.
Isn’t it funny that you can exist on the same exact planet, on the same day, at the same “time” simultaneously, roaming inside the same 24 hours, but be in completely different states of mind?
That two people can co-exist, at the same time, on opposite sides of the planet and somehow also bask in the same ray of sunlight? Never at the same time all at once, but we share one sun that we all orbit around, no matter where we are.
And yet, despite sharing the same earth, the same atmosphere, and living through the same number of hours in a day, where you are: geographically and the environment you inhabit can dramatically change your experience of time.
When you transverse the expanse of the spinning globe we all stand on and notice how the stretches of daylight shifts between different continents, with the oscillation of the seasons, and how sunset transitions into the night, you are reminded of the one true constant of the universe: motion.
This edition is a study of those movements and a nudge to learn to move with it rather than against it.
I write about the small things that compound into a life well-lived: brain, mind, body, and soul. It’s free to join, if you’re not with us yet. Becoming a patron is the best way to keep what’s being built here going. Thank you for being here.
Eat whole foods. It’s tempting to believe we can supplement our way to good nutrition. That the right pill, taken faithfully, might be the answer to the meal we missed. But if there’s one thread I’ve learned about how nature works, including our own physiology, it’s that nature knows the difference between the real thing and its imitation. The research agrees: there’s no substitute for quality meals made of whole foods, especially when it comes to overall health and maintaining cognitive function. So I’ve been nourishing my brain with natural sources of neuro-supportive nutrients whenever I can: legumes, olive oil, and fatty fish like sardines and mackerel. But a general rule of thumb I rely on: eat what you can pronounce and what didn’t take many steps to become edible. The more steps it needed to get to your plate, the more processed the food.
Dopamine doesn’t care if it’s productive. Hustle culture has trained a lot of us to feel inadequate the moment we’re “unproductive”—but the irony is that everything we do, even in stillness, will influence our states of mind. Even the seemingly useless thing stimulates the mind; and sometimes, I’d argue, is the thing you need. Because sometimes maybe what’s worthwhile is to do the thing for no other reason beyond the experience of the thing itself. That’s what I’m looking forward to this weekend: I’ve scheduled a long overdue artist date with some clay. (An artist date is Julia Cameron’s method for nurturing our creative spirit: a solo, once-weekly adventure to do something purely for the fun of it.) What’s your version of an artist date? FYI it’s not just for “creatives.”
Horizontal is a posture, not a sin. The lure of floating in an enclosed warm water pod is real, but there’s an easier (and free) version that’ll also give the body the rest it craves. (Don’t we all love a good deal.) Task: simply lie down, flat, in the comfort of your own bed: with no sound, neither a song, or anything that might disturb your peace. For the next 30 minutes all you need to do is to simply lie still and let yourself be. It’s surprisingly hard to do. My body immediately relaxed, but my mind started darting right and left—to dos, strayed thoughts, and low-grade anxiety. How strange, that stillness can be so confronting. Ha.
Prompted reflections. Sometimes, instead of simply writing down whatever comes to mind first, I’ve found it helpful to ask myself structure reflections. These three small questions or three sentences to complete:“I think… I feel… I want…” were the chosen three I’ve returned to this week. I’ve been intentional about training my soul to listen more closely to what it’s nudging me towards because refining and trusting my intuition is the thing I am working on. Amid the constant inputs, the notifications, the fidgety urge to fill every gap with a scroll or some flavor of productivity, what my soul needed this week was honest reflection. So that’s exactly what I did. I sat with myself and wrote to finish these three sentences for a few rounds. But, I can’t take the credit, I learned this exercise listening to this helpful talk about authenticity by Erin Weed.
Here’s another thing you can enjoy, simply for the novelty of enjoying the process of these musicians being fed a song and then playing their rendition of it immediately, live. Simply appreciating the genius of other humans is always awe-inspiring—and absolutely worth your time this week.
“There’s a reason why it’s called a gut feeling. The gut and the brain are connected. There is a wholeness, a whole body sense that we need to tap into in order to make sense of our lives and figure out how we go forward.” — Manoush Zomorodi
I’ve been feeding myself with intention: nutrient-dense meals whenever I can, because whole foods over processed is the constant goal. So here’s what most of my mornings look like. Instead of sugary cereal, a bowl of nuts, seeds, and berries: a genuinely delicious alternative to the bowl of sugar we’ve all been marketed and conditioned to eat. A few staples are missing though. Some mornings I’ll add in goji berries, mulberries, and always top it off with full-fat fresh milk, because whole foods is always my preferred choice. Because how many steps does it take to make oat milk?
Honne, the band, turns 10. Wow I feel old.
This mellowed out version of their music, in this 10 year anniversary album, is not only a signal of my aging millennial ears and therefore my refining preferences (as I like to tell myself) haha, but a real wonderful soother I hope you’ll enjoy too this week.