I remember when Memorial Day was simply May 30th not the convenient holiday weekend; indeed, it was meant to be a day to memorialize, not a holiday. While I can appreciate it makes it easier to compact Memorial Day into a weekend and not disrupt the middle of the week for honoring those who have served and died for this country, at the same time I think this undervalues the meaning of, and reason for, Memorial Day in the first place.
I hate war, wish no one ever had to go to war, but at the same time know that there are times when a person or a country must defend itself. Only two of the wars of the last hundred years have been of that variety, though. Still, my family has had, and has now, many people who have been part of the military, and for them, especially for those who died, I have a need in me to keep Memorial Day first about them, secondly a holiday weekend for heading to the shore.
Convenience is not what life is always best served by and relates to this blog in that the convenience of so much food in nearly every place we will find ourselves on any given day is partly responsible for the struggles more and more people are having with sugars-starch-artificial sweets. A bit of inconvenience presents a halt, a time to think, a bit of consideration before acting. If we are able to have the time to think a little bit before we rush headlong to buy and eat something we will quickly regret, then maybe we will have fewer of those episodes. I found that one of my best strategies has been to shop at specific times, and buy nothing that is not on my list. Never buy food at anything but at the grocery market or farmers market or online market. Never eat in any place that qualifies as a fast-food joint. Making food a bit less convenient makes me think more about what good food really is, and not simply a response to that “old” brain that wants carb foods because for most of human history they were hard to come by, but of course are very easy to come by nowadays.
So, stopping to remember what is important has a great deal of virtue, whether for something as heart heavy as soldiers serving, suffering, and dying, or the daily routines of life.
For those we ought remember,
Nan aka Sugarbaby
Sugaraholics 