Yesterday I came within one hundred calories of eating only three meals.
Around 7:30 in the evening, I made my daughter a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, sliced peaches, banana, and vanilla unsweetened soy milk. She lost interest before she finished. Three lonely tablespoons remained in the bowl.
As I carried it to the sink, a familiar voice appeared.
“Don’t let perfectly good food go to waste.”
Naturally, I obeyed.
I polished off the leftovers before rinsing the bowl, thereby adding roughly one hundred unnecessary calories to my day under the noble banner of environmental stewardship.
It’s remarkable how virtue always volunteers to represent appetite in court.
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel especially guilty. One hundred calories is hardly the nutritional equivalent of robbing a bank.
Later that evening, while my wife visited with friends, I watched Perfect Days. It is one of those rare films that quietly restores your faith in ordinary goodness. Its protagonist cleans public toilets with such humility and grace that he makes most ambitious people seem spiritually impoverished.
The film’s generous silences reminded me of La Strada. Both movies revolve around souls so guileless they expose the vulgarity of everyone around them. As I watched Perfect Days, I kept thinking, This has the same moral weather as La Strada.
Yesterday also taught me three lessons.
The first concerns hunger.
Going five or six hours between lunch and dinner is uncomfortable.
That’s all.
It isn’t torture.
It isn’t a crisis.
It isn’t an emergency requiring immediate intervention by almonds, protein bars, or peanut butter.
It’s simply a mild inconvenience.
Seeing it stripped of melodrama made me realize something about myself. If I insist on pampering every small discomfort, I’ll never accomplish anything worthwhile. I have no trouble punishing myself on the Airdyne or during a hard kettlebell workout. Physical exertion doesn’t intimidate me.
Resisting the urge to snack?
That turns out to be the harder discipline.
And that’s precisely why I need to practice it.
The goal is straightforward: 230 pounds down to 210.
No heroics.
Just consistency.
The second lesson concerned reading.
Or rather, the uncomfortable realization that I haven’t really been reading.
Twice I “read” Elaine Pagels’ Why Religion? on my Kindle.
Now I’m listening to the audiobook.
The difference is almost embarrassing.
The audiobook has revealed a memoir that is moving, intellectually rich, and deeply humane. I feel as though I’m absorbing ten times more than I ever did with the Kindle. My earlier readings now strike me less as acts of reading than as acts of turning pages while my mind wandered off to inspect some unrelated shiny object.
Apparently my eyes were reading.
My brain had clocked out.
The only way I genuinely read on a Kindle is as a form of critical study. I sit at my desktop with the Kindle open on one monitor and Google Docs on the other. I take notes, write commentary, formulate questions, and argue with the author. That’s reading.
Collapsing into bed with a Kindle at night turns out to be something else entirely.
I’m beginning to suspect that bedtime belongs to printed books or audiobooks, while the Kindle belongs at my desk, where it can be interrogated rather than merely glanced at.
Ironically, as I write this, another possibility occurs to me. Perhaps a split-screen setup on my laptop—with the Kindle on one side and Google Docs on the other—would recreate that same active engagement away from my desktop.
That idea sounds far better now than it did five minutes ago.
The third lesson came courtesy of Dvořák.
Ever since buying a Marshall Stanmore III for the bedroom, I’ve fallen even more deeply in love with classical music. Last night I typed Dvořák’s name into the SiriusXM search bar, and the app rewarded me with an endless procession of Eastern European composers.
The sound pouring out of that speaker is breathtaking.
Rich.
Warm.
Expansive.
The music doesn’t merely occupy the room.
It ennobles it.
In fact, it may be sabotaging my Kindle reading. Faced with music that beautiful, why would I pay attention to the printed page? The orchestra wins every time.
Then bedtime arrives.
I reach for the power button.
And a strange thought enters my mind.
Turning off music this beautiful feels almost morally questionable.
Surely another symphony wouldn’t hurt.
Perhaps just one more movement.
This is, I admit, the most luxurious problem I’ve ever had.
I won’t lose sleep over it.
If my greatest dilemma is choosing between Dvořák and Elaine Pagels before bed, I have wandered into the safest corner of the First World.
Cinemorphosis 
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