I Used To Hate Brown Rice
After lunch today, I decided that I was going to have a nice hot cup of chai tea instead of my normal sweet treat of organic decaf coffee with hot coconut milk, two teaspoons of maple syrup and a sprinkle of cinnamon. I walked up the stairs with my hot water and soaking tea bag, ready to get back to work on my computer.
I thought to myself, I can do this, I don’t need coffee, I’ll just have this delicious tea. As I took the tea bag out, little flecks of tea herbs floated along the top of the water. I took a sip of the tea, slightly annoyed with the grainy herbs now in my mouth. I tried to convince myself, this is good, I like this, this is healthier for me.
After I finished my tea, I felt agitated and was obsessively thinking about my coffee. I thought to myself, why don’t I just finish off the rest of the coconut milk? Then I won’t buy anymore. When the coconut milk is gone, I’ll just stop drinking the coffee for a while. Then I decided I had better things to do than waste my time thinking about the coffee, so I went back downstairs and made one to enjoy.
This reminded me of another time a few years ago when I decided I was going to start eating more whole grain rice and less processed pasta. Not only was I going to switch to rice, but I was going all in and planning on having some brown rice. I’ve always been a pasta girl. So going from making good old gluten-filled white pasta to soaking brown rice was way too much of a leap for me.
Flashback now to the beginning of my healing journey, a few years ago. It was the end of the day, I had the brown rice soaking in a bowl for a while and I was ready to get dinner cooking. I was hungry, tired and rushing to get something on the table. I had never in my life gone through the process of soaking rice or beans or lentils or anything and this felt like a big hassle at the time. I looked at the instructions again and the rice was supposed to soak for at least another hour. Suddenly, I was totally pissed at that bowl of soaking brown rice.
I picked up the metal bowl, threw it into the sink and yelled “I f-ing hate brown rice!” The bowl bounced and clanged around and all of the rice spilled out and into the sink. I cleaned it up, crying and feeling bad for wasting the rice, and not planning better. I felt overwhelmed with trying to do everything too healthy, too quickly. I don't remember what we had for dinner that evening, but it wasn’t brown rice.
This afternoon, I didn’t throw my innocent herbal tea into the sink. I sipped it, tried to savor it, but it just wasn’t doing the trick for me today. I was inspired to give up coffee since my husband gave it up five days ago. He just decided and did it. It was the right time for him and he had strong reasons for why he wanted to stop drinking it.
Sometimes we can push ourselves to make changes too quickly that are not the right timing for us or not even meant for us at all. Maybe I’ll continue to drink my decaf coffee. Maybe the sweet taste, warming and grounding feeling after lunch habit is more helpful than harmful to me. Or maybe I’ll really learn to love tea some day, like now I love brown rice. We are all on our own healing journeys, getting healthier in our own way and in our own timing.