What are you willing to die to this Easter

It is Easter weekend and a time when many people up their sugar intake and gorge on Easter eggs. For many years, I followed the same trend.

Easter as we know it today is a blend of Easter from a Christian perspective as well as the festivals of Anglo-Saxon goddess of renewal Eostre. I owe the dates of my Easter egg season to the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, who broke away the Jewish calendar which lined up Easter with the Passover, and ruled that all churches should follow a single rule for Easter. The history and politics of the dates get my brain cells all muddled up. I don’t go into the science of the actual dates and measuring the equinox, I simply rely on Google to tell me when Easter comes along.

While I am not Catholic, I have spent years following that break of lent and scoffed down my Easter with the rest of them. If you are one of my readers who is not Catholic and don’t know what lent is; it is the 40-day period which comes before Easter. This marks a period of fasting.

In essence, Easter is about the death of the old, so that new life can be born. It is what the resurrection is about. But when we break that fasting process, it is with the enthusiasm of a kind eating their first Easter egg. For the better part of my first 50 years, I kept that wide-eyed wonder for the many delicacies available at Easter. However, nowadays I try to avoid chocolate. I still have a love for the creamy dark stuff. But my body protests every time I eat it. I get a bit of a tremor and I just feel awful.

My friends, family and fans know I have passion and vigour for the things that I want to do, but sugar just seems to rob me of the energy to do them. As a novelist, I need a lot of energy to put together a 90 000 novel. And my latest project was revamping the Dragon Whisperer’s Field Guide, which is now available on Amazon.

I first started by cutting back. Even some of my early social media posts had some images of chocolate in them. Now not only have I cut back, I also let friends and family know that come my birthday or Christmas time, please don’t give me chocolate. Fr my 50ths my daughter even told the guest not to buy me chocolate. You see, I have to put to death that chocoholic badge I wore. Because on the other side of it, there was better energy, more productivity and longevity. I am switching to dark chocolate when I get the odd craving, because this fairly bitter stuff has some health benefits. There are other habits, relationships or choices that I also have to kill off, because I owe it to myself, my family and my Creator to live the best version of me.

Sometimes the things that have to go can be small and sometimes they are big . For some it is the tendency to complain or gossip. If you have big goals, it may mean cutting back on Netflix. For others it may mean deciding how you are going to process pain. I had a friend who had chronic blood pressure and I only knew that from her husband. She was always such a delight to be around that I always looked forward to being around her. That is what I want to be like when I am around my grandchildren. I want to be the person that all my future grandkids want to spend time with.

In the literary world our editors call it “Killing off your darlings.” These are things that we authors love to write about, but do not progress the story.

Whatever choice you make, letting go of things that no longer serve you could be the very thing to breathe new life into the next growth phase of your journey.