No, this is not a treatise on eating disorders. This is about how our lives, our exciting, creative lives are often all about bingeing and purging. And it’s not a bad thing.
I go on a novel-reading binge, gobbling up three Barbara Kingsolvers in less than three weeks. How did I not read her until now? The purge is coming up. I’ll probably not read another novel for four or five months, as I purge myself of fabricated worlds and immerse myself in nonfiction. I binge-watch Alone, and then I don’t watch television for weeks. I drink three cappuccinos a day, and then go coffee-less for a month.
I hike 500 miles across northern Spain, a 37-day binge. And then it’s winter, and the binge is over. And I am inside, in a warm gym, taking classes, working the machines, learning to box.
If you thinking of “bingeing” as giving yourself up entirely to something, immersing yourself, saturating yourself in it, losing yourself in it, then bingeing becomes a vibrant whole-hearted act. A powerful, exhilarating act. But not sustainable. Not meant to be sustainable.
If you think of “purging” as cleansing, sluicing out the brain, the body, the spirit to make way for new “binges,” then the purge is also a powerful and necessary act.
Years ago I stayed at an agritourismo near Montepulciano run by Fiori, Marzia and their teenage daughter. They had re-built the place, themselves, from a few ancient stone buildings. The gardens, vegetable and flower, were breathtaking. They had a small vineyard, a big field lush with girasole (sunflowers), hand-laid stone patios, honeysuckle-covered verandas, and a number of repurposed little outbuildings. How had they accomplished all this, I asked Fiori. Where did all these ideas and all this energy come from? “Ah,” he said, with a big smile, “Marzia…she is a woman of much imaginations.”
I strive to be a woman of much imaginations. I think this what living a truly engaged life is all about. And I think that means bingeing and purging, throwing myself into the great wide open and then, sated, pulling back to recoup, to cleanse, to ready myself for the next adventure.