Midnight Pita

Trouble sleeping brings me to reflect on my recent life decisions. And cook a nice pita meal.

Midnight meal... woke up around 2:00am and was not feeling very well. I knew what I had to do.

For the past two to four weeks I have been working very hard and working all hours of the day. I'm talking behind the scenes stuff... website design and development, graphic design, video editing, project planning, marketing, writing and reading emails, driving, phone calls, trying to shoot photos and videos, social media, meetings, driving, researching many things... and still trying to squeeze in training and teaching, of course. And driving...

It has not been easy at all. I have been staying up until 5am and later on many, many nights. Sometimes only sleeping 3-5 hours and getting back up to start it up again.

I haven't always made time to cook. And I have been trying to make my (relatively) new meatless diet stick. Vegetarian for now, many vegan meals also, and some day soon I hope I will be fully vegan. But I have not been eating well. I have not been drinking enough water. I have not been sleeping well. I need to do better. I need to spend less time sitting at the computer (at least a lot of times it's on the floor, where I can move around and stretch...).

I am so tired.

I woke up this night and said to myself "you need to eat. You need to drink water. You NEED it and you know it. So get up and do it."

Fortunately, I had some veggies and tofu in the fridge and some pita bread I just decided to grab the other day after looking through a vegan cookbook for the first time that my lovely girlfriend got me for my birthday (back in April... did I mention I've been super busy?). So I cleaned my large skillet and got to work.

It was a simple idea. Throw all the veggies in the pan with some oil for several minutes and then pile them into some pita bread. It started off very troublesome... I somehow managed to explode nearly two entire bulbs of garlic onto the floor. Good to feel like I still have some strength, I suppose. But that was still discouraging and disappointing. I continued and this is what I ended up with. A beautiful mound of nutrition for my tired, hungry belly.

Many do not know this, but I have felt very beaten down by life lately. I don’t often share thoughts like that, but there it is. I'm getting older. I’m feeling older. I’m feeling off-track. Something’s been missing. Many things, I suppose. I’ve been doing so many more things lately for work and yet I feel like I cannot get anything done, like I’m trying to scratch my way out of an endless tunnel.

This morning I need to leave my house by 6:30am at the very latest to drive 40 miles north of the city through the morning rush hour traffic to get to Chicago Waldorf School for an all-day (9:00a - 3:00p) first aid/CPR course. Then I have a meeting immediately following the course. Then, it’s back to any one of my dozens of projects I currently have going on...

It won’t end, not just yet. This is what needs to be done. This is my life, working for myself; but really working for hundreds of others at the same time. Thousands even. Millions perhaps. What I’m doing now, I like to believe, will have positive effects that will ripple well into the future, hopefully long past my time. This is the power I believe our discipline can have on the world. Parkour, Art du Déplacement, Freerunning… whatever we call it. This is why I do it. This is how I do it.