Spicy beanburgers, mashed potatoes, swede, tomatoes, mushrooms.
I want to be totally absorbed in the eating experience. I want to get inside my food.
The paradox with food is that I put a lot of effort and thought into buying it in the shops, I get hungry and look forward to eating it, I spend a long time preparing it all, after I've finished I think 'oh, that was nice', but while I'm actually eating it I'm nearly always thinking about something else. If only I could savour the pleasure in the moment a bit more, what a happy man I would be.
8 comments:
Swede...I've never liked, but I love the idea of savouring the food moment.
Lillipilli: Yes, there should be a mass international food-savouring moment, shouldn't there be?
Never trust a person who isn't a slightly messy eater.
Octavia: You've learnt by that mistake too, have you?
it's that sort of being in the moment thing, i think. like some things are better retrospectively, or in theory. food-wise, if i'm distracted, i kind of fail to notice eating it. like with most things, focusing is better than autopilot.
Roberta: Yes indeed. It's interesting how we enjoy experiences retrospectively differently from how we enjoy them at the time. Does that mean we are enjoying them more (or less) than we realise, or that we later interpret them falsely?
It is often good to think about the past and the future, but eating is a prime example of where savouring the present is most beneficial.
it's weird. i think sort of resavouring an experience is different from rose-tinting it, though.
maybe we're not ever entirely aware of how we feel about an experience at any present time, as hm, at any point, we might think we're having just one feeling, but actually, it's always a ton of them. and feelings are so subjective there's prob no 'true' or 'false' in that context.
but i'm often a retrospective sort of a girl. and i know personally i sometimes turn over in my mind / talk / write about memories / events to ... make them seem more real. i think.
i suspect living in the present is probably always most beneficial. anything else is prob contrary to where we are. (um. the present. i mean)
'scuse the thinking aloud in your comment box. :)
Roberta again: Please feel free to think aloud on Solisist In Exile anytime.
I think it's hard to hang on to a genuine emotional memory. More commonly we file an image of an experience in our mind. Often this is influenced by cultural expectations, e.g. an image of Christmas, a holiday or a party resembling that of a stereotypical photograph of people enjoying such occasions, rather than a memory of how the experience actually was, moment-to-moment.
There is a danger for writers that the writing about an experience appears to have a greater reality than the direct experiencing, yes.
I do think that thinking about the future and the past can be healthy (and practical). We do exist in time, we are more than just a collection of moments, the connection between one moment and the next helps define us and enrichen our lives. The different wealth of experiencing a moment deeply tends to occur when we relax away from the self moving through life. I wouldn't advocate doing that too often, but dinner is a good time for it.
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