Pismaniye: Day 25

By the end of the day, I was getting concerned that I was not going to have anything to “write home about” for today. You couldn’t exactly have a day in the Month of Inspiration that didn’t have inspiration.

(The truth is, you might have an uninspiring day in the Month of Inspiration, but it’s not because the inspiration wasn’t there. It’s because you weren’t open to it that day. Of course, this knowledge wasn’t really helping much at the time.)

Well, Day 25 was getting to be one of these days. I had shuffled a couple appointments around last-minute, because I felt I needed the extra time at home. I had not been feeling particularly motivated, despite there being a whole lot to do. And to really exacerbate the fact that these choices were really not working well for me, I showed up for an ice cream benefit on the wrong day!

It was around 8 p.m. when I walked away from the ice cream place and back the seven blocks to my car – with no ice cream but with a heavy feeling of failure instead. “Man, I really screwed up this day!” I thought. That I was living in the Month of Inspiration was the furthest thing from my mind.

Then I came upon a Mediterranean restaurant. It always smells good around this place, and this time was no exception. I popped in to see what homemade desserts they had today: baklawa, Turkish delights, and these squares that looked like stringy cotton candy. The girl behind the counter was very helpful and vouched that they were all delicious. Of course, I asked about the one I’d never seen before, the one she wouldn’t tell me the name of. They reminded me square versions of the Highland cows in Scotland, without the horns and the rural smell.

Pismaniye. (Here's what it looks like.) It has a more traditional name, but it’s harder to say. I got one vanilla square and one chocolate square to go. I didn’t even wait to get back to my car to start tearing into it. Delicious and mentally stimulating! I wondered the whole time how they made these things.

And that’s when it hit me. I had stopped thinking about how much of screw-up I had been today. I had stopped strategizing how I could fix it before I went to bed that night. I had gotten a do-over – and my inspiration for the day.

Tony Robbins says that in order to get past your misery, you have to start ahead of it. There’s nothing like something strange and delicious to help us get out of our own misery and re-connect us to the world. Do you feel like you need a reset button? What will be your strange and delicious “pasmaniye experience” today?