I’m testing Joel’s ideas about a good day by keeping track of exercise, meditation, awareness, listening, etc. every day of this nice, long holiday vacation. I decided to keep a diary of my eating online.  (There’s a cool Google application that allows you to track calories and list all the foods you eat in a day. )

I am enjoying my days very much on this vacation, but I am frustrated by not seeing results yet of all the extra exercise, reduced calorie, enhanced mindfulness.  Supposedly, I should be able to consume 2,000 calories/day at my age, height, weight, and amount of exercise.  I find that I gain weight when I go over 1,500 calories, however.  And I have not lost any weight after consuming an average of 1,200 calories this week! I have been burning 300-400 calories in exercise, also.

The frustration of having a very efficient metabolism means that it takes longer than usual for me to see results when I focus on the nutrition and exercise part of having a good day.  I could be so discouraged that I give up.

Instead, I am going to assume that my diet of soup, salad, small portions of lean meat, bread, and fresh fruit is doing good things for me, even when they don’t show up on the scales or my side profile.

And I also assume that this is an opportunity to become even more aware of what my body is telling me about this stage in life.  Maybe the fact that I need less food to sustain myself means that I can be more aware of how many people cannot sustain themselves at all. What else can I do, especially during the holidays, to make life easier for them?  Tonight when we shop, I will look for the Salvation Army bell ringer and a red bucket.

By exercising outside in the snow and sunshine, as I did today, I taught myself to be optimistic about my day even without as many pages read or written or pounds dropped as I would like to see. I paused on the path in the woods and raised my ski pole to the sun, thanking God for a mindful moment and for the wonderful warmth in my muscles that reminds me how good it is to be alive.

I began my day with a wonderful bowl of steel-cut oats, two tablespoons of brown sugar, some low-fat milk, and a spoon full of sunflower seeds.  I love the texture of those round, pearly oats.  The memory of the pleasure of eating them is as nutritious for my spirit as the actual calories they gave me.  My spirit rises or falls a hundred times during the day.  But those nutty, tapioca-like oats make me smile long after they are gone.  Perhaps there something like spiritual metabolism?  What is your idea of a good day?

I count it a great privilege just to sit in the presence of Joel Elkes and his wife Sally Lucke, two of the most vibrant, hopeful people I know.  I wish him a happy birthday today from the Detroit airport.

Joel was a good friend of two other giants–Jonas Salk and Jacob Bronowski.  He gave the Jacob Bronowski Memorial Lecture at the Salk Institute on January 19, 1978, “On the Neurosciences, Awareness, Choice, and the Good Day.”  Joel knows how to combine delightfully strange ideas and to make the theoretical eminently practical.

The way he described Jacob Bronowski at the beginning of this lecture, applies perfectly to himself, thus fulfilling the aphorism that we often become what we admire: “Jacob Bronowski was a vast continent of a man, cognisant of his own map and deeply aware of his own geology.”

I thought immediately of Shakespeare’s words for Cassius in describing Julius Ceasar: “He doth bestride the narrow world like a Collosus.”  But Joel Elke’s description is even more profound.  Bronowski was not just huge, like the Collosus of Rhodes or any other natural wonder, he was a huge natural force aware of his own topography, “cognisant of his own map.”

Since Joel built three major research centers for brain sciences as they relate to mental illness, and since he is one of the founders of the field of psychopharmacology, he knows much about mapping the brain.  Bronowski, like Joel, was a big thinker, someone who did not yield to the temptation to learn only more and more about less and less.  He contemplated the universe and everything in it.  So does Joel.  And out of that contemplation comes the map of his own mind.  Out of that contemplation comes intimate knowledge of the layer upon layer of metaphoric sand and rock–igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic–that compose the human mind. The layers at the deepest level were not placed there by us, and there is no way to separate one person’s geology from the landscape of the whole.

The brain can be mapped.  The mind and spirit have to be explored.  The wise person has intimate knowledge of both.  Memoir writers at their best are cartographers of their own lives, connecting them to the geology of the places that formed their spirits and of the people who have gone before them.

Joel, I hope you are laughing today in Kalamazoo.  Thank you for giving me such a vivid image of just how wide and deep one life can be.