It’s not a race. You don’t have to crouch and wait for the starter’s gun then go like hell. Life is a much more placid and wonderful gift when you’re not racing around trying to do dozens of things at the same time.

Indeed, when I try to do everything at once I usually end up doing much less than I would have if I had been attentive to a single task and had seen it through to its natural conclusion before moving to the next.

I’ve been busy and neglected some of the important parts of life lately. I want to do it all, but it all takes a great deal of time. Something has to give and usually it’s something important. That seems to be the paradox of living in today’s fast-moving world.

Slowing down seems impossible, but there is a way. Once the big deadlines are over, take a little time and decide on what’s important in life. How do I want to feel as I go about my day-to-day life?

I have allowed myself so many times to feel that I am trapped and yet many of the bars around me were of my own making. One of the happiest weeks of my life was when I decided to do something every single day that nourished the inner me so I could experience feelings of liberation, abundance and wonderful self expression. I chose ways to get those feelings while doing tasks I had to do. I walked instead of taking the car so I could spend a little time thinking about how lucky I was to have the liberation of owning my hours and not being enslaved to a strict schedule like those who have to catch the 7.15 train to be at work at a specific time. I blessed my washing up time because I had an abundance of water caught off our roof then heated by the sun. I blessed making my lunch salad because I had an abundance of vegetables and salad fruit to use. And whether I took a photograph, wrote some prose or sang a little, I made a little window of time where I could savour the great enjoyment and fulfilment of self expression.

Sometimes in this life it’s the things you don’t do that are just as important as the things you do. So when it seems like a race, it can be a good idea to be a non-starter and think about where you’re going rather than the speed you might accomplish. It doesn’t really matter if you’re the fastest or the slowest. You have to be travelling in the right direction.

I become overwhelmed very easily. It doesn’t help that I often start from a place where I feel that I won’t be able to do something. It can be a fairly simple thing—trying to find my way to somewhere while driving in a strange city or getting my work done on a tight deadline. It might be the book I’ve always wanted to write. I know I could write the book but could I find a publisher or would I have to publish it myself? Oh, don’t know how to do that so I won’t even start writing it. Or I’ll start and the worries will intervene and I’ll leave the project half finished.

It might be going for a job that I have the qualifications for but wonder if I really would be able to do it. How is it other people much less skilled than I can find such confidence to exude, to the point of actually lying about their abilities? I always have at least a low grade anxiety and am often quite paralysed by the thought that there is something I can’t do. If I plan to start a project, I always feel I need to know how to do everything that it will entail before I actually begin. This is not only stupid, it’s dangerous. It uses up that first wonderful flush of enthusiasm, it stymies momentum before it gets even started and it drains confidence.

I start from an I-can’t-do-this position instead of looking forward to learning new skills and overcoming difficulties. And yet, here I am with this website—albeit a simple one—that I knew I would never be able to accomplish. I’ve got a degree I knew I wasn’t smart enough to get. But my life is littered with so many missed opportunities because I let this attitude get in my way. As I get older I realise I have limited myself my entire life. The time that has gone, I will never get back. So I need to address this anxiety, this feeling that I’m never quite good enough, before too much more lifetime goes by. One way is to be prepared to ask for help, something I’ve never been comfortable doing. The other is to analyse what is actually paralysing me and to work, as a little project in itself, on the skills that I need for that particular thing. Instead of sitting worrying about it, I can catapult myself through that obstacle when I come to it because I have been chawing away at it in the background. A bit like what anxiety does to me.

I’ve had some wonderful successes and am quite happy to do things that other people fear, but I can’t transfer the confidence and I have never, ever ridden on the back of any accomplishment to give me a headstart to the next one. I always start again in the same dreary place.

How does this relate to good health? When we’re coming from a place that’s way behind, we need momentum. We need little successes that can urge us on. We have to start even without all the information we might think we require, to be pragmatic that there will be obstacles and to have a simple attitude that we use to work through challenges.

What if I absolutely refused to let that anxiety eat away under the surface, unnamed and the more powerful because of it? I’m not talking about therapy here. What if I had a couple of questions that I could ask to winkle that anxiety out from under its rock into the bright light of day so I could really look hard at it and see if it is the monster I fear? How much power would it have over me then?

I think the secret is in the ‘now’—and only considering the obstacles when (or even if) they present themselves. We can plan all we like, but in the last analysis if our plans don’t inspire action they are worth nothing to us anyway.

So, here’s an idea on making it so simple that it’s almost impossible to fail. Acknowledge the obstacle or the possibility that there might be an obstacle. Put it in its place. Do the next thing at hand. I could word it something like this: Yes, that could be a challenge, but it’s for my future self. What is the one action I can do to progress this right now? I’ll do that.

Learning to cook for yourself has to be up there with some of the most important skills on the planet, like vegetable gardening, the ability to think and problem solve, literacy and inventiveness.

Being able to prepare your own food from scratch means that you can wrest back the power from the manufacturers who supply the supermarkets. Suddenly you have complete control over the ingredient list of the foods you’re eating because you are using mostly single ingredients to create your individual style of cuisine.

In the old days, women knew how to cook. They learned it at their mothers’ knees. Food was often simple, even rustic, but filled with goodness and prepared with that special blend of time and caring that I believe is missing from many of the products we eat today.

Today we have a number of interesting challenges. Genetically modified produce is one of the biggies. Farming practices are vastly different to days gone by. Many of us are food snobs … and the menus of restaurants reflect that, with their ever-more-maddening descriptions of food. Talk about obfuscation!

One of the greatest advantages of our time, though, is ready access to information. In a few minutes we can find out how to make our own sweet and sour sauce to go with lightly cooked Asian vegetables. We can do curries from scratch. We can learn to prepare a myriad of dishes from YouTube clips and recipe sites. We do not need to be slaves of bottled simmer sauces and packet pastas. We can discover that pasta making only involves egg, flour, salt and water. Or even simpler, semolina flour, salt and water. We can make our own artisan bread with just flour, yeast and water—then refrigerate and let time do the rest of the work right up until the time when we pull out a bit of dough and bake it. This is rustic indeed, but delicious and fun.

So we have the power. What we often don’t have is the time. But everyone is blessed with the same 24 hours in a day and the way we use those 24 hours is about choices. Ah, the crux of the matter. We must choose to cook from scratch. We must schedule time for buying produce, making sure we have the right kitchen utensils for the task. We must commit to cooking for ourselves.

Preparing food is a procedure that requires some effort a number of times a day. There are ways to streamline the process—cooking a number of meals at once and freezing or combining the ingredients for future slow cooker meals and freezing them until the night before you want to cook them, for example. Or getting your shopping delivered to the door is an option for some people. That said, even the most efficient kitchen requires considerable time spent on meal preparation. The effort is amply repaid by the quality of food on the table.

Not doing your own meal preparation doesn’t mean you’re too busy or too important for the task. It means you haven’t thought through your priorities. The health of you and your family needs to be number 1—and the food you eat plays a big role in that.

There’s an easy way to eat more vegetables. Just add vegetables to nearly everything you eat. Making mince? Grate carrot and zucchini and perhaps onion into it plus have a heap of steamed vegies on the side. Spaghetti bolognaise sauce? Puree cooked vegetables and slip them in with the tomatoes. Don’t eat the spaghetti as a meal in itself. Put half as much as usual on your plate and fill the other half with greens. 

Eat vegetables for breakfast. We are the product of our conditioning, but we can break out. Who actually said you couldn’t have a plate of veggies for breakfast? The cereal companies that want you to eat their less-than-healthy, sugar-in-a-box? 

You just have to have cake? Zucchini  works in some recipes, pumpkin makes a moist cake and beetroot can go into chocolate cake.

One of the easiest ways I’ve found to add more raw vegetables to my diet is to combine cooked and raw food. While I often have salad for lunch, I also often fry some mushroom and eggplant in coconut oil to stir through the salad and warm it a little. That works perfectly in winter when salads seem too cold. But of course the reverse is possible as well. While I have a meal cooking I often chop up raw vegetables to put in at the last moment before serving. Some vegetables that add crunch to the softer cooked foods include celery, chinese cabbage and any other kind of cabbage, snow peas and diced cauliflower.

I also grab the box grater and hold it over my pot of cooked food and grate in a little carrot and zucchini. I might cut a couple of raw tomatoes into a certain dish or pop in some mushrooms for another. English spinach works perfectly in so many dishes. Capsicum can add a splash of colour as well as crunch—red, green or yellow. It’s simply a case of deciding to do it then experimenting a little.

Vegetables rule!