Dateline: Summer 2002
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Time: Approximately 6am
A young Jon, visiting a friend who’s teaching in Seoul, is lost.
The World Cup is on (unfortunately England’s group games are in neighbouring Japan) and we’ve been to see Portugal – USA.
And followed it with several hours of drinking.
I’ve lost my friends.
Can’t get the Korean taxi drivers to understand where I want to go.
And I am generally confused by the street signs.
Fast forward to about two weeks ago.
And I discover why I found the addresses and signs so confusing.
Oriental address used to be done somewhat differently to ours.
Although, in recent years, they have been adopting the way we do things.
In our system, we name the streets.
And a building or block is on that street.
In the old oriental system they named the blocks.
And address might be Region – Area – Block.
The streets were just the gaps between the buildings.
It’s a perfectly valid way of doing it.
And, once you get your head round it, no harder than the way we’re used to, I’m sure.
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It’s bit like healthy eating in that way.
You knew there was a parallel coming, didn’t you?
Most people come to us thinking that healthy eating is hard.
Time consuming.
Restrictive.
Boring.
But, after a while, you can see their mindset change.
It’s just a different way of doing the same thing.
And, once you get used to it, no harder to do.
Once people put the right systems in place, the effort can often be less.
Batch cooked healthy meals take less time per meal than getting take out, popping out to StarBucks, etc does.
Doing an online shop for healthy ingredients is easier than going to the supermarket where things ‘jump’ into your trolley.
There are an infinite number of heathy, nourishing, tasty meals that you can have.
You don’t need to stick to chicken and broccoli for the rest of your life.
We only think it’s harder, restrictive, boring, etc because that’s what we’ve always thought.
What we’ve heard others say.
What we’ve, sub-consciously, cherry picked ‘proof’ of.
Like that time we tried a 30 minute recipe that took two hours and didn’t taste nice?
If you’re still thinking healthy eating is hard, boring and restrictive………
Then taking some time to question and analyse that thought……….
Will be a great use of your time.
Getting your ‘head round’ that is one of the biggest wins you can make 🙂
Much love,
Jon ‘I finally got back when the 57th Taxi Driver I stopped understood my pathetic attempt at Korean’ Hall and Matt ‘Apparently they stopped eating dog there years ago’ Nicholson
