Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. All right, we had an election last night in the United States of America. I do live in the United States of America. I also lived in Australia for a couple of years and living overseas, overseas from the United States for that period of time gave me enough of a sense that no matter where you live in the world, you probably have a sense that the United States of America just had a very impactful election. I am going to talk about that in this week's vlog, and I'm not going to talk about the specifics. Actually, this vlog comes out on Wednesday, the morning after the election, but I'm not recording it on Wednesday. I record the vlog on Monday, so I am off the hook in that sense. I don't know what happened. I don't know. Me here, standing here today, is Susan from 48 hours ago. I don't know what happened and it wouldn't matter anyway, because no matter what happens, I'm not going to be talking about it in those terms. I don't know if we know as of Wednesday morning if we have a winner. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know anything about it, but I do have some thoughts. I was of course wondering, geez, I put out vlogs on Wednesday. We have this big election on Tuesday. We don't talk about politics and Bright Line Eating?. Am I just going to blow right past it and talk about how to do Bright Line Eating when you have young kids or whether it's healthier to eat your vegetables cooked or raw or find some other topic to talk about? But I decided to just address it. I do have four things to say. I do have four things to say about this election.
I have four thoughts, and my first thought is that first and foremost, I know that I'm going to be watching the election returns. My daughter Maya wants to watch with me. We're going to watch at my dad's house. We're going to watch late into the night, like late into the night. I have no idea when we'll stop, but probably until I fall asleep in the wee hours of the morning. I remember doing that for two other specific presidential elections. One a long time ago, I was in college at UC Berkeley, and one just a couple of elections ago. One was a scenario where I was happy with the returns. One was a scenario where I was not happy with the returns. In both cases, I was binging my brains out all night. It's so interesting, right? I was watching the returns come in and I needed to do it with a big bowl of sugar and flour, like raw cookie dough type food and eating until I was sick, sick, sick, sick, sick. And I know that I'm not doing that this time. I'm going to be Bright. If I have anything while watching those election returns, it's going to be a cup of maybe ginger tea or peppermint tea, maybe a glass of water, maybe nothing, maybe just some cuddles with my daughter, Maya, no matter how it's coming down. That's the first thing is happening over here.
My program staying Bright, not eating sugar and flour, eating only in exactly what I commit, eating my three weighted and measured meals that's happening over here. It's on a separate track from all of this life gets lifey stuff. I am weighing and measuring my food and staying Bright, and I wasn't always able to do that even after being introduced to these tools. No judgment. If you're eating your way through election night, if you did already eat your way through election night, no judgment. I get it. I've been there. I've been there. And thank you, God, I do not need to do that today. I know that that is poison to me. It would not help anything. It would not change anything. It wouldn't even make the night go easier. Nothing. Food does not help anything fundamentally. It's beautiful fuel. I love my meals, but I am not eating my way through election night. So, that's my first thought.
The second thought is this election and lots of kind of similar things in life really bring to the forefront the serenity prayer, the demarcation between what we can control and what we can't control, and that there is a no man's land in between them, where we need wisdom to discern the difference. Because I don't think it's accurate to say that we can't control this election at all. We can vote, we can canvas, we can make phone calls, we can donate, we can talk to people, we can have some impact. Elections are actually the aggregate impact of lots of individuals having their impact. We can control our actions, our behaviors, but we can't control outcomes. Nothing like a contested election or a close election to bring to the forefront that we can't control outcomes. We can do our best with our behavior, but the results are out of our hands. Research shows that people are happier when they spend the lion's share of their time focusing on outcomes that are within their control, brushing their teeth twice a day, making sure that they hang out with good quality people, have lots of good friends, eat good food, all the things that we can control, get to bed on time to get a good night's sleep. There's so much that's within our sphere of control. And so, I think this is a good opportunity to ask ourselves how much time and focus do we spend on things that are outside of our control? I noticed in the last week or two that I was feeling like I was getting a lot of negative input in my life. I was reading a lot of political news that was some negative input, just contentious, intense stuff. Stuff with one of my kiddos was challenging. I shot a vlog a couple weeks ago about family emergency room visits that were challenging. And then what was the other piece? Yeah, several types of just challenging. Oh, I have a friend. I have a friend who's really struggling in life right now, just major psychiatric issues. A lot of inputs. What I noticed was I talked about it with a friend who's like, could you take the night off of reading political news? And I was like, Ugh. It was hard. And then, my mama bear part really swooped in because I didn't used to ever read political news at all. I have this Part that was like, Susan, if you're finding it hard to take a night off of reading political news, you are off the beam girlfriend. You are way over the edge. Then I stopped and became?I kind of broke the habit. I broke the cycle and it became easier to just disconnect a bit. But I have control over how much of that stuff I let in to my sphere. People are happier when they spend the lion's share of their time and effort on things that they can control.
The other thought that I have?I got two more thoughts. I am so grateful for our Bright Line Eating community and how we handle politics here. Just so you know, if you put specific comments about candidates or how people should be handling this, anything contentious or specific that's not about how we as Bright Lifers? and Bright Line Eaters navigate hard world stuff Bright and with our sanity intact. If you get political in our threads underneath this, we will remove it. I'm just telling the Bright Line Eating team right now, have no hesitation. Just remove it. Delete, delete, delete. If it crosses our communal norms, take it out. Remove it. We do a beautiful job here of staying focused on our primary purpose, our point, our main, our raison d?etre, which in French means reason for being right here in Bright Line Eating, which is to create a safe space for people to find a healthier relationship with food through Bright lines.
One of the outcroppings of how well we do that is people are in groups, Mastermind Groups, Gideon Games groups, general online posting forums with people who think all kinds of different ways about various issues including political issues. And it's fine. We love each other and coexist and get along. There might be topics that we don't discuss, and we get a chance to see each other's humanity and to be reminded that people are our people and are good. We can have a lot in common with people that we don't share political views with. We have this common problem in Bright Line Eating. This addictive relationship with food. A weight struggle. A food struggle. We have the common solution of adopting four Bright Lines and a community program to heal together in community. That common problem and common solution binds us together and gives us a lot to talk about and a lot of common ground and shared experience.
Maybe you're as lucky as I am to have people in your family who think differently politically from you. I used to think it was not a blessing. I used to think it was a challenge and an issue, and I've changed my mind on that. I think it's a blessing and a real bounty to have people that I can ask, Hey, what are you thinking about this issue in my silo over here? But I know there's other ways to think about it and that there's good people thinking about it differently. I have people that I love and trust that I can check in with and they'll tell me what a different perspective is. I'll be like, oh, I would?ve never thought of it that way. I can see if I were you, I would be thinking of it exactly that way. That makes a lot of sense.
And I don't know if privately in Bright Line Eating, you have any friends that you do that with, don't bring it into our global community. But there's no restrictions on what you talk to your friends about behind closed doors. Have at it. But here in Bright Line Eating, we at least at bare minimum have the blessing and the bounty of knowing that we are connected and bonded and communicating and loving and trusting interrelatedness with lots of people who are good people who think all kinds of different ways than we do. I think there's a lot of people right now who don't even have that, who don't even connect with anyone who thinks differently than they do. It's such a blessing, and it is a blessing, of course, to have the safe protected space without political ads and anybody screaming at you about how you got to vote or anything like that. Thank God we have this safe space. And I'm just going to say it again, don't go post that nationalist beneath this thread. We will delete it. This is not about that. This is about how do we stay Bright through an election cycle. Yes, there's something happening in the world. We're talking about how we orient toward it and how we stay Bright through it.
The final point I want to mention is something that my mentor brought up recently related to the election, which is a question she's asking herself regularly. And the question is, is this self-inflicted pain? Is this self-inflicted angst? Am I torturing myself right now mentally? Is there any good reason for it? She's just asking herself that as a mantra, is this self-inflicted pain? that's a little of what I had to do a week or so ago when I realized I was reading too much political news, is this self-inflicted pain? So, happy day after the election, God bless us all, and I'm so grateful to be in community with you. I'm so grateful to have carved out our little piece of the world where we can be together focused on a different kind of objective than a political objective. Our own collective and individual healing when it comes to our relationship with food. But there's a lot to be learned from how we navigate our Bright Journey as we are embedded in a sociopolitical context that's unfolding around us. Some external environments do make it harder to stay peaceful mentally. If that's not your experience, then that's awesome, because the point is that we stay Bright so that we can be happy, calm, peaceful, useful people. If outside events are shaking us from our core center, our groundedness, then it's our job to bring ourselves back to center. Is this self-inflicted pain or am I just going to go take a deep breath and weigh and measure the next Bright meal and trust? That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
