The letter and the spirit

At the beginning of the month I posed myself a challenge for the rest of the month: Savor all the food that I eat.

So far, I’ve been failing. And quite spectacularly so.

This morning I didn’t taste a single bite of the bread that I ate (I think I ate it. I remember it was there at one point and now I have an empty plate with some crumbs on it). And I let my tea go cold so I just slurped it up quickly so as not to have to bother with it.

Dinner yesterday was slightly better, but not a lot. I was watching a series at the same time. And focusing on moving pictures and the food moving in my mouth as well is just a bit too much for my poor (male) brain. I did think about my food every twentieth bite or so, so I guess that’s not a complete failure.

Put in that light, I am definitely failing the letter of the challenge. But the spirit of it is actually going quite well.

Because honestly, it doesn’t matter that much whether I actually taste every single bite. Nothing bad happens if I find myself with a full stomach and no recollection of how that happened.

But it does matter that I’m at least giving these things a bit more attention. One bite out of twenty is already a lot more than I used to do. And even if at the moment I don’t realize I’m focusing on my computer and not my food, I do notice it afterwards (as in, right now as I’m writing this). Which then allows me to evaluate how I feel about that (mostly a bit ashamed that I have gotten so used to constantly being “entertained”).

In the end, I’m learning quite a bit about myself, my habits, what I enjoy and how many things I do completely on auto-pilot. All of that is very useful in thinking about what might be better and then how to go about it.

One final thing I’m getting out of this is a sense of forgiveness. I’m not rising to my own challenge. But I can forgive myself for that as well.

And now I have six days left in which to do a little bit better…