How to eat an elephant🐘

Birthday reflections on patience, childlike wonder, and enjoying every bite

“How do you eat an elephant?”
”One bite at a time.”

I’m an impatient person. I eat fast, walk fast, talk fast. I know I have to slow down when the patient I’m pushing in a wheelchair says “oooh, it’s cold,” referring to the headwind we created by zipping down the hospital corridor. I’m the kind of person who checks an email for spelling mistakes after she’s sent it, makes important decisions without taking the time to think it through properly, and has published work before it was ready.

The popular (and self-defeating) “all or nothing” attitude that so many of us share comes from one source only: impatience.
We do crash diets and boot camps because we want results NOW, stubbornly believe the myth of “overnight” success (everybody who “suddenly” became successful has usually worked towards their goal for years), and we live in a society where we can “buy now, pay tomorrow”. On TV we watch massive home transformations done in a matter of days, we get online orders delivered within 24 hours, and we avoid the possibility of disappointment about not getting an item at the local store by checking online first if it’s available. Instant gratification has become so normal that it’s expected, and in the process we have lost the art of waiting – to our detriment.

I’m turning 44 on Wednesday, which means I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Being bored and having to amuse yourself were still commonplace when I was a kid. Our entertainment on long car rides was looking out the window or reading a book, and if you got carsick when reading as I did, you played (translation: fought) with your sibling.
As a child I had extraordinary patience and self-control. I never peeked ahead in my advent calendar, didn’t snoop for presents, and could make a bar of chocolate (my favourite treat as a child) last two weeks, eating only one small square a day. I enjoyed the anticipation for a treat as much as the treat itself, maybe even more so.
I’m a dreamer, and making up stories and imagining an elaborate future for myself was a great pleasure of mine. It wasn’t so much about getting that future – the joy lay in making it up.
In German there is a saying: Anticipation is the greatest joy (Vorfreude ist die schönste Freude). I knew that as a kid, but then I lost the knowledge in adulthood.

If you hear the message to “reach your goals”, “achieve your dreams”, “manifest your deepest desires” often enough, it eventually will take hold of you, whether you’re aware of it or not.
The journey becomes nothing but a means to an end, which is to reach the goal as fast as possible.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we know more about life, joy, and happiness as children than we do as adults. But we believe that part of growing up means leaving all our childish ways behind, so we do just that. We exchange childlike wonder for cynicism, wild excitment for numbing our emotions with alcohol and other substances, wearing our heart on a sleeve for hiding behind masks. We pretend to like things we don’t because we think we should, and we deny ourselves so much that we begin to forget what it is that makes us happy.

I don’t have a great interest in music. Sure, there are songs I like and I don’t mind if music is on in the background, but if given the choice I prefer silence or listening to stories. For most of my life I felt so embarrassed about it that I didn’t admit this to anyone. What kind of person doesn’t like music? Not to mention that I was supposed to be a musician; I’ve played the church organ at services from the time I was 15 until I was 33. Needless to say, I felt like a fraud for most of that time, spending an extraordinary amount of time, practice, and energy doing something that requires a passion I didn’t feel. But I did it because it made other people happy, and because I didn’t admit to myself that I didn’t like doing it.

You can lie to yourself for years, even decades, if you want to believe your lie. I did. It wasn’t until I stumbled across my real passion – writing – and experienced the pleasure it gave me that I found the courage to give up the fake one. The year I started writing regularly was also the year I quit playing the organ for good – and I’ve never looked back.

Growing older is really an unlearning of all the bullshit we’ve picked up over the years. Bad advice, patriarchal limitations, old thinking that we now recognize as harmful – the more confident we grow, the easier it is to let go of all that. Becoming who we are is, at its core, returning to who we used to be before we let the world change us.

And just like children do stuff just for fun, so can we as adults. Personal experience has taught me that thinking we are only successful at something if we make money with it can really take the fun out of it. We can define what success means for us, regardless of what the world defines it as.

I’m relearning to enjoy the making of things. While writing my three previous books I was primarily foused on the completion of them. I thought endlessly what would happen after they were published: how would they be received? Would I sell enough, or any? When would I be able to start calling myself an author without feeling like a fraud?
I completely forgot that the act of writing is what I enjoy, not what happens after. The journey had become secondary to “achieving the dream”, which I mistakenly translated into making a finished product as fast as possible. I wrote as if someone was standing next to me with a stopwatch, urging me to go faster, write more, sit down longer. I was already behind, wasn’t I?

Relax.

Many things in life resemble eating an elephant: paying off debt. Running a marathon. Sobriety. Writing a book. Learning a new language. Building a house. We know that these seemingly huge, insurmountable mountains can be climbed if we chip away at them one step at a time. But here’s the important bit we tend to forget: it’s not about finishing the elephant as fast as possible. It’s about enjoying every bite.

There are so many small moments of achievement in an ordinary day: writing 800 more words, or thinking of a new plot twist for my novel. Having my very active dogs sleep next to me on the couch because I managed to tire them out in the woods. Putting some money in my savings account. Finding a cute towel hook for the new house that hasn’t been built yet. Cooking a decent meal with a bunch of random ingredients I found in the fridge.

We don’t start living once we reach a certain weight, or when we retire, or when we have built our dream home. We are not living a lesser life until we have reached our goals. We live now, right this second, in our imperfect, impermanent state. We better enjoy every last bite.

Happy Birthday to all my fellow December babies! Don’t forget that aging is a privilege and one hell of a fun ride.

🥳 Miriam