Junk food, taking it easy and other holiday pleasures

It's summer time, and yesterday was Canada's equivalent of July 4th. Since I'm an American living in Canada, I'm indulging in some down time right now, and I'm off my storyboard discipline.

One of the things I did was buy some junk food and sweets, which I normally don't keep around the house. Chocolate covered almonds, a hunk of halvah (ground sesame seeds with pistachios and walnuts) and some potato chips and microwave popcorn. Not being a person of moderation, I have been steadily demolishing my little stash.

As I get older, it's interesting how much more quickly I feel the bad effects of eating this kind of food, how it creates addictive cravings, causes me to feel fatigued, making it easy for me to look forward to not having it around again.

I'm also enjoying lying around reading, watching movies, lingering at the club yesterday instead of trying to rush back.

But, I'm glad to know that I can get back on my storyboard whenever I want to, and find that productivity, that discipline and that ability to see my dreams take shape in small baby steps.

I read this passage today in Graham Greene's "The Ministry of Fear" which spoke to me about the importance of dreaming, one of the key components of storyboarding. Rowe is wracked with guilt over having killed his wife --a murder he committed out of pity for her suffering.

"He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at day-dreams, but so long as you had the capacity to day-dream, there was a change that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind--until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in. Since the death of his wife Rowe had never day-dreamed; all through the trial he had never even dreamed of an acquittal. It was as if that side of the brain had been dried up: he was no longer capable of sacrifice, courage, virtue, because he no longer dreamed of them. He was aware of the loss; the world had dropped a dimension and become paper-thin. He wanted to dream, but all he could practise now was despair, and the kind of cunning which warned him to approach Mr. Rennit with circumspection." p. 81 The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene, William Heinemann Ltd. London