In honour of World Vegetarian Day/Month, this would be a great weekend to experiment with kicking the meat habit.

What does eating vegetarian have to do with being softer?

It’s kinder to your body – Since cholesterol comes from animal “products”, vegetarians have way lower cholesterol levels, and hence lower rates of heart disease and stroke. Vegetarians also have lower weight, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of cancer and diabetes.

It’s kinder to the Earth – 18% of greenhouse gases come from meat production, versus 13% from cars. In North America, half of all water resources, one-third of all fossil fuels, 70% of grains, and 80 percent of agricultural land are used to raise animals for food.

It’s kinder to animals – Do I need to explain this one? By going vegetarian, you can save around 100 animals a year. If you need incentive, and are ready to find out where your meat comes from, watch this very unsoft video.

It’s so yummy!

I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years now, but I know being a full-time vegetarian it’s not for everyone. But just like cutting your electricity use or car use, cutting your meat intake by whatever percentage you can manage will help make the world a softer place.

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Want to go longer than a day? Here’s a few more resources:

Vegetarian Starter Kit (Or order a hard copy variation)

Making the transition – with recipes!

More recipes!

Today I’m urging you to take a break from reading or watching the news.

Yes, as citizens of the world, we want to be informed, but I’ve noticed that the main headlines as reported by newspapers, television or online is basically a roll call of who died or was attacked in some way, and how. The more intense the violence involved, the more likely we are to hear about it. (The old “if it bleeds, it leads” adage.)

Is this what you want to fill your eyes and mind with, as one of the first acts of your day?

Or if it’s political headlines or blogs you prefer, think about whether reading them is mainly a way to get an adrenaline rush, to see what the “Other Side” has done now, and commiserate with others in outrage.

So what do I suggest instead, to reduce rather than raise your blood pressure? Taking a walk outside. Cloud gazing. Reading a book. Finger painting. Daydreaming. Cuddling a pet or human. Reading positive blogs. Playing with a yoyo.

I realize that news reporting can at times be helpful to galvanize people to take action. If you’re worried that you’ll miss something important that you should respond to, you could set up an automatic payment to the Red Cross and/or your favourite political group to cover whatever the crisis of the moment is.

Give it a try, for a morning, a day, the whole weekend — and let us know how it works out.

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I stole this idea from my friend Zadie: a structure-free day. Pick one day a week where you have no agenda, no plans, no to-do list. Just do whatever you feel like doing. Could be going for a long bike ride or calling friends or (my personal favourite) lying on the couch with a book. If you truly feel like painting the porch, you can do it, but not because you feel like you have to, or because you said that’s what you would do this weekend.

It’s a refreshing feeling!

What happens when ask yourself “What do I really feel like doing right now?” instead of “What should I be doing right now?”

For this weekend’s Try This, I offer a can’t-fail fun-maker: the yoyo.

I hadn’t played with one for quite some time, but picked one up at a store a while ago and just the feel of it in my hand made me smile immediately. I’m convinced flinging an object around on a string can’t help but “take years off your age.” Just watch out for bonking yourself (or others) in the head. Not saying that happened to me or anything…

If you actually need a rational reason to pick up a yoyo, it turns out that playing with a yoyo is great mental exercise because it uses both the left and right sides of your brain! Who knew?

If you don’t have one in the back of your closet or kitchen drawer, just going to pick one up could provide a spirit of adventure. Linger in the toy store! Try out all kinds of stuff! They’ve got all kinds of fancy models that light up and return to you automatically, but the old tried and true classic yoyo will do more than fine!

Once yoyo is safely in hand and you’ve had some time to play on your own, you can learn to do some tricks if you want. I found a site for beginner yoyo tricks, and one for more advanced.

Here’s the winner of the 2005 YoYo championships, for inspiration:

Give it a spin! Have a fun weekend!

Hooray for the long weekend! I was already getting out of office replies yesterday afternoon and to those people I say “Bravo!”

If you’re working today, I hereby authorize you to leave at noon.

And furthermore, I authorize you to go outside and leave your email behind for the weekend. Or at least several hours of it. Soak up the last of the summer and leave your “smart” phone behind. Curl up with a book rather than hovering over your computer, waiting for that new email “ding.”

Is your email notification set for every 10 minutes? (or less?!) Do you check it last thing at night and first thing in the morning? If you’re away from your computer or phone, do you get nervous that you’re missing something?

Patricia Wallace, in her book The Psychology of the Internet talks about email (and other web activities) as an example of a “variable ratio schedule” of rewards. So instead of the rat who gets pellets every time he hits the button, she likens our compulsive checking of email to a gambler at a slot machine. Maybe this time there will be a hilarious message for me to read, someone writing me to invite me to something fun, or tell me how great I am. Because you know, sometimes there is! And it feels awesome! But we can make a conscious decision about how often in a day we need to do that check, and how many times a day we’re going to take the time to scan and delete all those other not-so-awesome emails.

The other side of the coin is checking because you’re afraid your work is going to burn down or you will be fired if you don’t respond in 5 minutes. I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you, that’s not gonna happen. I promise.

Here are various strategies to try. Some will be harder than others – maybe try one this weekend and work your way up to another one that sounds impossible to you now!

• Don’t check work email from home. Or if you’re self-employed, set filters so you don’t see work emails. (More on this another time).
• Change your “check for new email” setting to once an hour.
• Change your setting to every five hours.
• Turn off automatic checking and choose specified times of day to check your email. If you operate strictly on webmail, close the browser window and choose times when you will check the site.
• Turn off the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, new mail notifications on your phone. Whatever it is, just push that little power button to Off. Not just “silent”. Off! How long can you go?
• Set a time at night when you will stop emailing.
• Set a time in the morning that will be your first check-in.
• Try an email-free morning!
• Check email once in the morning and then not again until the following morning!
• Check email in the evening and then not again for 36 hours!
• Go nuts and go email-free for the whole weekend!

Do any of these sound radical or extremist to you? That’s because there is a nearly universal acceptance now that we must be in constant contact by email, even if that means constant interruptions to our day and attention. It has become socially acceptable to respond to email and text messages from people who are not with you, taking away from the time and attention that you are spending on the people who are right in front of you!

But I urge you to try something different, even if it’s just temporary. Put that email urge to sleep for a bit. See what it feels like.

Which of these can you can bring yourself to adopt? How did it go? Share your results here. This isn’t a contest of who’s more virtuous or pure for going the longest without checking, but an experiment for YOU to see how addicted you are to that rush, that need to be needed, that need to respond. Make sure that you are in control of your email checking habit, rather than the other way around!

Good luck and have a soft weekend!

This weekend’s challenge involves creating a quieter environment for yourself.

Do you keep a constant “soundtrack” to fill your space with music or talking? iTunes, internet radio, stereo, or the television talk show “keeping you company”? Do you turn them on the minute you wake up and come home? Do you plug in your earphones every time you walk out the door?

There’s no doubt that music can be very helpful at times to pep us up, but as an experiment, try turning it all off. Just for an hour.

How does it feel? Do you feel a little desperate for noise? What scares you about the silence?

Are you more focused on whatever you’re doing? Or, are you more aware of your attention wandering, instead of to the words of a song or the thoughts of a pundit, to thoughts or images of your own? What are those thoughts or images? If they’re fears, try writing them down to find out what it is that you’re trying to avoid thinking about. If they are fantasies, what is it your heart is asking for?

What does your environment sound like? Are there birds chirping, dogs barking? Are there people outside having fun? Do you want to go join them? Or are there people yelling? Can you send them peaceful poz vibes? What electrical sounds are filling your space? Can you unplug some of them, turn down the hum?

Speaking of humming, if you have the urge to provide your own soft soundtrack, go for it! If it’s a song with words, what are those words, or what is the title of the song? I find if a song appears in my head, it may carry a message for me. Is your mind or heart trying to tell you something? Are you allowing yourself some silence in your life to hear it?

Share your experience!

Every Friday, I’ll be offering up something fun and/or courageous for us all to try over the weekend. Be sure to comment to let us know how it went!

This weekend’s challenge: smile at strangers.

Depending what size city/town you live in, this may seem like a radical idea. I remember my sister telling me once on the New York subway not to smile because people would either think I was crazy, or a gullible, easy-target tourist!

Smiling has been shown to improve our health and attractiveness, and to improve our own mood.

Here’s how you do it:

I live in a decent-sized prairie town where people are pretty friendly, so I’ll up the challenge by going to the downtown district where we have our share of suits rushing by on Important Business.

Things to investigate:

- Is it contagious? Do people smile back? Does age or clothes style affect the return rate?
- Does it feel good just to do it, even if people don’t respond?
- If people don’t smile back, do you feel judged somehow?

Maybe another weekend we’ll try something radical like saying “good morning” to our fellow world-dwellers…