One time my friend came over with a candy thermometer and we made homemade fudge. I remember eating a lot of it.
At one point my friend was telling me an anecdote, and while I was listening I was absentmindedly devouring a wallet-sized slab of fudge.
“Whoa, slow down!” she said. “You’re eating it like a sandwich!”
This happens to me with sweets sometimes. Some deep, primordial impulse is driving me to physically incorporate the food substance into my body as efficiently as possible, like an ancient jellyfish subsuming a paralyzed sardine.
This impulse conflicts with a more complex, more human capability, which is to consciously appreciate the experience of eating the thing. Why did we bother to make fudge anyway, rather than just eat handfuls of sugar right out of the bag? Well, because humans have this ability, should we choose to exercise it, to appreciate the experiences we have, rather than just seek things in accordance to instinct and habit. It might be one of the best things about us.
Read More
Several billion years ago, a cosmic accident occurred that would eventually make some of us periodically unhappy. According to scientists, an gargantuan space object hit the earth during its formation, knocking it into a tilted, wobbly spin, which is the reason there’s a summer and a winter.
Under this strange condition, Earth’s creatures evolved and thrived. Eventually, some of them became philosophers and poets, who described this condition and its meaning to the rest of us. They noticed the way the sun’s arc changed throughout the year, and mused about the flamboyant moods and cycles of nature. They admired summer’s golden daffodils and shy sumacs, and lamented winter’s specter-grey frost and northward-thronging robins, probably unaware that the changing seasons aren’t some universal system of order, but a peculiar and convoluted local side-effect of two large rocks having collided long ago.
So we have a thing we call winter, whose days tend to be low in certain mood-improving qualities (light, warmth) and high in certain mood-diminishing qualities (cold, isolation). This sends many people into a compromised state for some of the year, until their part of the planet wobbles its way back around into the thicker light. So it goes.
Read More
I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
I find that, for me, the problem is less about staying committed to my goals than it is about deciding which goals are worth pursuing in the first place, and what the best way to pursue them is. I guess what I'm suffering from is some kind of ungodly hybrid...