Keep calm and eat steak, eggs
ARE we leaner, richer, calmer, wiser this year, as we so fervently intended? Perhaps only wiser.
Last year, we had really been trying to change — or, at least, we had been reading about trying. Book sales prove there is a ballooning market for “selfimprovement” works.
What seems to sell at the moment is the promise of calm. Four centuries ago, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote that all our miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Our urgent desire for tranquillity must be the force behind last year’s publishing phenomenon. Amazon’s bestselling title last year, Animal Kingdom, a colouring book for grown-ups by Millie Marotta, had sold almost 500 000 copies by Christmas Day. Marotta rationalised its runaway success as “a muchneeded distraction from the ‘grown-up’ world”; a novel way into Pascal’s quiet room.
This year’s self-help books are all hoping to coax us out from vicious mental blocks and bring some form of joy: whether through eating the meaty diet of a Palaeolithic hunter or purging our earthly goods and tidying what remains into neat origami folds, like the Japanese.
Among the diet books, Broth by Vicki Edgson and Heather Thomas and The Soup Cleanse by Angela Blatteis and Vivienne Vella announce that souping is the new juicing. Another diet stakes its authority in the distant past. The Paleo Diet: Healing Bible by Christine Bailey argues that our guts have not been able to evolve as rapidly as our behaviour. Thus we still carry the internal piping of a Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer. In dietary terms, a human stomach is bemused by dairy, wheat and refined sugar, since it was expecting roots and slabs of beef.
The Paleo Diet satisfies common sense and the palate: endless poached eggs and steaks are allowed, with as many vegetables as one wants (but white potatoes are out).
In contrast, a lifestyle regimen with little patience for those who wallow in the past is to be found in Spark Joy by the Japanese tidying guru Marie Kondo.
However, most of this year’s self-help books shade into one another because most are hawking mindfulness, the meditation method that is on its way to being enshrined as a panacea. Crudely described, it is Buddhist meditation minus all the other beliefs; the mind must observe its thoughts dispassionately — accepting that anxieties are there without actually feeling anxious, for instance.
But even “mindful” colouring can backfire. “I will sit there worrying if I’m going to mess it up,” wrote Lucy Fyles, a 24year-old colouring enthusiast, on her blog last year. “I might colour that green, but what if I get it wrong, what if it’s too green?”— ©