Preparing Dinner Can Actually be Enjoyable With This Approach
BY MINA HAMILTON, REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION
Believe it or not, one of the best times for taking a break is right before you make dinner. Sound crazy? You'll agree if you read this take-a-break, which comes from Mina Hamilton's marvelous book, Serenity to Go: Calming Techniques for Your Hectic Life and which is reprinted with her permission. It is one of the best plain-spoken explanations on why deep breathing is an essential component for living with serenity.
Cooking dinner for a grumpy husband and hungry kids? Feels like the last straw? Before starting preparations for your evening meal, think about two things which you often take for granted. This gratitude exercise will be much easier if you have already done the "Post-commute Breather." Don't have time? Don't worry, this is going to take a maximum of three to five minutes.
Sit in a chair in the Egyptian pose. Take several long, deep breaths. For a few minutes, be grateful for your good fortune in having a stove and a ready supply of fuel. In your kitchen all you have to do is flick your wrist. Flick. With a quick rotation of your wrist, you turn the handle on the stove. Zip! The pilot light ignites the gas. A blue burst of flame leaps up around the burner. You turn it down and prepare to sauté some garlic. Or you simply wait for the electricity to heat up the coils of the burner. In either case, the effort required is minimal: a slight twist of your wrist.
That dance of heat, whether it's provided by gas or electricity, would astonish many less fortunate people all over the planet. For them, flicks of the wrist are out of the question. The flames required for cooking depend on stooping and bending. Lifting and hauling. Gathering wood or dried dung. Imagine the trek home with prickly branches piled on top your head! Give a sigh of relief. On top of your busy day, you did not have to go out and forage for wood.
At first this gratitude exercise may irritate you. You protest, "I don't want to think of all those people who are less well-off than I am. "Enough of the planet's headaches. I have enough of my own." Yes, I know you have bills to pay. Kids who are squabbling. A boss who daily drives you nuts.
Keep breathing. Long, deep breaths. Despite your own, very real problems, your stove is a miracle. I use the word "miracle" advisedly. I'm not talking about divine intervention (that's for you to decide). I'm talking about one of the dictionary definitions for miracle: an extraordinary situation or accomplishment. From the average American's vantage point, the stove is distinctly ho-hum.
Seen from the perspective of a woman in Rio de Janeiro who lives in a shack without electricity or running water your stove is a miracle. No doubt about it. As fantastic and unfathomable as Neil Armstrong's 1969 walk on the moon would have been to folk living in 1890.
Giving thanks today for two kitchen miracles seems like too much? If so, flex your gratitude muscles on another day. Try a Saturday or Sunday when you're less pressed for time.
Up for more gratitude? Please continue. Another flick of the wrist. You turn on the faucet. You'll use it to wash some lettuce. Again this act would be considered stunning in vast areas of the planet. The water coming out of your tap was transported via an elaborate network of pipes from the darndest places. A reservoir located hundreds of miles away, if you live in southern California. Or maybe it comes from an aquifer or your own local well.
Take a moment to be in appreciation of the privilege you have. With the merest touch of your fingers clear, clean water gushes out of your faucet. Sure, it may have a lingering taste of chlorine. Yes, you may choose to install a water filter or opt to buy bottled water for drinking purposes. But you have the capacity of cooking and washing with the life-giving liquid. It pours out of your faucets. In a hot and cold versions. (If you're a person who lives in an area of serious droughts like Arizona or Texas, this exercise will really resonate with you.)
Live in an apartment building? How did your water get up there -- high in the sky? It was piped up to you on the twenty-second floor courtesy of purring pressure pumps, gurgling pipes. Give some thanks to the sanitation engineers, architects, plumbers, laborers who helped design and build the elaborate infrastructure required to deliver water to your home or apartment.
Acknowledge the bounteousness of nature, the awe of water falling down out of the sky. Pretty amazing how a complex combination of events -- wind whirling around the planet, moisture condensing off of lakes, rivers, oceans, and forests, clouds of ice crystals forming overhead, snowflakes falling out of the sky, snowflakes turning to rain as it gets nearer the warmer earth -- delivers H2O to you and yours.
Your water supply is another miracle for millions of folk around the planet. They do without running water. They lug water in metal cans from a communal well, which may be many dusty, hot miles away. And carrying water is hard; it's heavy. Thank goodness! You didn't have to cap the day off slinging a pail of water onto your shoulders.
Keep breathing. You've got blessings. Many of them. Design your own personal gratitude exercises for the kitchen. The convenience of your refrigerator. The advantage of being connected to an electric grid. The beauties of organically grown, pre-washed baby carrots, which you regularly pluck from the shelves of your local supermarket.
Continue with the preparations for your dinner.
© Copyright 2001, Mina Hamilton |
