Better Living Through Jello
Full disclosure. I spent a significant amount of my career in rare air of the restaurant world: a hospitality group that was values- and activism-driven, 100% female- and privately-owned, and committed to the concept of whole ingredients prepared fresh and to-order by caring individuals. Not a preservative or stabilizing ingredient in sight. That is to say, not the place you would find a Jello aficionado. Yet, here we are.
Some background might be in order. I grew up in Indiana as an only child of what I realize now are iconoclasts and academics, who used family time to drive between our small college town and Chicago. I grew up not only knowing about the big world out there, but spending half my time living in it. So in the 1970s, Jello was not a part of my normal, suburban existence — because I didn’t have one. Jello fascinated me, maybe because of the colors and flavors (my parents grew bean sprouts for fun) or maybe because of the “normal on steroids” life you would have to lead to have a Jello mold appear on your table at night. Like I said, I was fascinated. I began collecting Jello recipes and Jello cookbooks. Some recipes were horrifying (tuna salad on a bed of lettuce and lime jello) and some were deliciously technicolor, like the stained glass “cake” made of cubes of jello suspended in creamy Jello fluff. I was hooked.
What does all of this have to do with wellbeing you ask? Great question, dear reader, and I am going to try and explain, if I didn’t lose you at the tuna salad. While just a tiny, rainbow-colored slice of my life, my Jello fascination has lasted through six schools, thirteen jobs, two partners, two and then four children, five dogs and more white t-shirts than I can count. It makes no sense in my profession, it fits nowhere into my personal “brand” (cringe), and it isn’t even the food item I am best known for making. But there it is nevertheless, a through-line of wellbeing DNA.
We are increasingly being encouraged to achieve higher and higher levels of productivity. Take the device upon which you are reading this post — is it designed to take you seamlessly from fun activities to work activities to fun activities to work activities and back again with less time spent doing…what? Are we hurling willy-nilly toward a goal that we don’t even remember choosing, not enjoying the path we are taking?
Add to this pressure of productivity the concept that we need to find OUR PURPOSE and engage in MEANINGFUL WORK. Oh dear God. Just the those two phrases alone give me neck hives — and I am supposed to be Ivy-league educated in this shit.
I recently met with two coaching clients, both right out of college. Both were anxious to the point of sleeplessness that they had not yet found their purpose, and the work that they were doing in their twenties was not going to lead them to the work that they needed to be doing in their thirties, and OH GOD WHAT IF I REACH FORTY AND HAVE PUT MYSELF ON THE WRONG ROAD?!
Somehow in the search for wellbeing, and through the Great Reconsideration-turned-Resignation, we have swapped the pursuit of money for purpose, but are still whipping ourselves for not having enough.
In these writings I aim offer, through the power of narrative, a tool for you to use to feel better, to have more wellbeing. The wellbeing lesson I am offering today is: Do the Thing That Doesn’t Make Sense. I am increasingly seeing clients who are petrified to stray out of the path that they see as being the most productive and the most purposeful, the latter a new layer of complexity in the last five years. This all-or-nothing attitude is too much pressure for our lizard brains, especially those that are just in the formative stages of their working lives. While coaching, I say that one’s purpose is constantly evolving, and should be something that adds to your lived experience, not detracts from it. Let’s see what group of things give us “lower-case p” purpose and hopefully those clues will lead to upper case Purpose at some point. Harvard Medical School professor Christopher Palmer, MD, advises us to look at purpose as being multifaceted, and exceedingly simple: our relationships, any role in which you feel valued, even our household chores (!!). Did you just feel a bit of the pressure ease?
Back to the Jello. Please, Do the Thing That Doesn’t Make Sense — once a week, once a day…don’t put rules on it. Am I suggesting Cheeto-dust covered slothfulness? No. I am advocating for an active, break, one that takes your brain into a deep dive you did not expect. What lights you up inside that you can spend more time on? Do you want to make your own butter? Are you the world’s next tiny camper renovator? Do you know more statistics about missed extra points in the AFC than you perhaps should? Therein lies the magic: taking out the should and being unabashed about your weird interests that have nothing to do with your career, your family, your (gasp!) purpose. Wellbeing will ensue, not the sugar high of happiness or the warm joy of helping others. What we are working toward are the grace notes of being a human outside of family and work. We are aiming for side conversations when you finally get the Pulitzer Prize that go something like this: "Did you know that she/he/they are also super into Mario Kart? Like expert level. Amazing.”
As Joseph Campbell says, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Maybe there’s a Jello mold inside.
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