Our team has a bi-weekly team meeting where we all get together, talk about numbers, team results and goals, major projects in progress, and we also have a quick section where one person on the team shares “reflections” on something of their choosing, which is usually personal. My manager asked me to do the reflections for today, so I decided… I’m going to tell everyone how American I am in my obsession with productivity, with always doing something, that I got so obsessed with “making the most” of the sheltering in place due to the pandemic, that I ended up giving myself cubital tunnel syndrome as a result of it. And so I had to learn to slow down and ease my obsession with always “doing something,” and also took up meditation to slow my mind down.

My colleague, who I am friendly with, sent me a book recommendation in light of my reflection — Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing,” which would likely aid in my desire to slow down. Yes, reading is actually doing something, but I like the idea of the book: resisting the attention economy.

Haskap berry jam from Prince Edward Island. Passion fruit jam from Paris. Lingonberry jam from Sweden. Quince peach cinnamon compote from London. During our travels, we’ve been gifted or purchased small jars of jam when we come across something unique or different than what we have easy access to in New York. And for the longest time, we barely touched any of the jars since pre-pandemic, we rarely bought bread at home, and even if we did, I’d need to store it, sliced, in our freezer because we were never home enough to eat it all before it went bad. Then once the pandemic began, we started going through all the jars, one by one. And finally, we had our last smear of haskap jam (TOTALLY OBSESSED; I’ve looked into mail ordering it from PEI) from the same company), and Chris got concerned and immediately started thinking about buying raspberry jam. So he went off to Trader Joe’s, picked up a jar of raspberry jam, and on a weekend we had it on toast…. and realized immediately how cloyingly sweet it was, like TOO SWEET, like we were just eating sugar with a sprinkle of fruit in it.

This is what happens when you become so accustomed to having jams that are made in small batches, by small businesses who are interested in showing you the real flavors of fruit, rather than the mass produced, bulk packaged commercial jams that people in today’s fast moving society just readily accept as “normal.”

A couple weeks later, Chris made us do a detour to the Greenmarket in Union Square to get a small batch jar of Beth’s jam. We’ll see if it’s any less sweet than this Trader Joe’s raspberry jam.

Chris loves to look at trends in our spending year over year, and he noted that in 2020, unsurprisingly, our grocery and takeout/delivery food spend was at its all-time highest levels. Part of the reason it is like that is not just because we were all sheltering in place, not just because we couldn’t dine out at restaurants, but it’s also because all of our work and pleasure travel was completely cancelled. A lot of our spending on dining out, indulgent/specialty foods or drinks happens when we are traveling. During travel is when we’d pick up things we normally wouldn’t find here in New York, such as haskap berry jam, passion fruit jam, a South Australia wine vinegar, or a dong ding oolong loose leaf tea from a very specific region in Taiwan. In 2020, I surprisingly not only drank ALL my tea that I got in China with the exception of some high end loose leafs that I’m spreading out (and… I got a LOT), but I nearly went through my entire supply of Sri Lankan Dilmah tea, which we usually get when we’re in Australia because they do not seem to distribute to the U.S. So that led me to buy matchas, some other sencha and genmaicha green teas from the Japanese grocery store, and also a few Nepali teas. With the world at your finger tips, I’ve been relying on online sources to send me the world to enjoy through my mouth. We’ve also been more indulgent with things we normally don’t buy much of, such as Indian sweets. This last weekend when we were in Jackson Heights, we spent nearly $38 on rasmalai, gulab jamun, pista rolls, and kesar ladoos from our favorite sweets shop, Maharaja Sweets. It was a record! I normally never get more than a pound of sweets there (the pricing is roughly about $11-12/lb, depending on which sweet you choose).

We have saved a lot of money because of the pandemic, but we’ve also managed to indulge in other areas, and with us, “indulging” tends to be through food.

Chris and I are both lucky in that we randomly get days off from work because of the pandemic. At my work, we call them ‘wellness days.” At his work, I don’t know what they call them, but they are just as random as mine are. Since he had a wellness day this Friday, he suggested I take the day off so that we could go to Costco. I looked at him and said, why do I have to take the day off when it’s your wellness day, but when I have a wellness day, you don’t want to take the day off? He basically went on his little spiel about how it’s harder for him to take days off when everyone else is working because “so much is going on.” That honestly seemed like a cop-out way of trying to say that his work is more important than mine, but given the fact that I have only taken two days off since beginning this job in September, I figured I might as well just take the day off and have some time away from a computer. And also, I’m not working in an emergency room, so nothing I am doing is that urgent or needs to be attended to immediately (he also does not work in an emergency room, but he can certainly treat his work as “importantly” as he wants to).

So, I’m taking a day off. These three days are the only days when I’ve taken a day off and not really traveled… like REALLY traveled. It’s an adjustment for me, but maybe that’s what I need to do more of: take random days off just for myself, even if I have nothing really to do… because that will be better for my health overall, mental and physical. I really do need to be better about “doing nothing” in a world that is constantly judging you based on productivity.