Much enthusiams

Binge. Purge.

No, this is not a treatise on eating disorders. This is about how our lives, our exciting, creative, counterclockwise lives are often all about bingeing and purging. And it’s not a bad thing.

I go on a novel-reading binge, gobbling up And the Dark Sacred Night, Painted Girls, Astonish Me and Arcadia in less than three weeks (the last three weeks, in fact). The purge is coming up. I’ll probably not read another novel for four or five months, as I purge myself of fabricated worlds and immerse myself in nonfiction. I binge-watch Orange is the New Black, and then I don’t watch television for weeks. I drink three or four cappuccinos a day (remember the fika I wrote about?) in Stockholm. And then go coffee-less for the next month.

I go through a binge cycle on exercise, too. Last week I ran every day. This week I’m not running at all. I go through intense periods of certain activities – circuit training, boxing, Barre3 – and then purge by moving on to something else, something entirely new.

If you think of “bingeing” as giving yourself up entirely to something, immersing yourself, saturating yourself in it, losing yourself in it, then bingeing becomes a vibrant whole-hearted act. A powerful, exhilarating act. But not sustainable. Not meant to be sustainable.

If you think of “purging” as cleansing, sluicing out the brain, the body, the spirit to make way for new “binges,” then the purge is also a powerful and necessary act.

Several years ago I stayed at an agritourismo near Montepulciano run by Fiori, Marzia and their teenage daughter. They had re-built the place, themselves, from a few ancient stone buildings. The gardens, vegetable and flower, were breathtaking. They had a small vineyard, a big field lush with girasole (sunflowers), hand-laid stone patios, honeysuckle-covered verandas and a number of beautifully crafted little outbuildings. How had they accomplished all this, I asked Fiori. Where did all these ideas and all this energy come from? “Ah,” he said, with a big smile, “Marzia…she is a woman of much imaginations.”

I want to be a woman of much imaginations. I think this is a major component of youthfulness as I’ve tried to define it for myself, a cornerstone of living the counterclockwise life. And I think that means bingeing and purging, throwing myself into the great wide open and then, sated, pulling back to recoup, to cleanse, to ready myself for the next adventure.