Last night..
I was cooking some Italian sausage. Not the links, but the kind that comes as a brick. The recipe calls for it to be broken down and browned in a frying pan.
Overall, I love to cook, and I am pretty good at it, having done it for many years. However, despite my generally amorous feelings toward the activity, there are certain tasks I dislike. A fair amount. Like:
Chopping garlic. Garlic is sticky, so the pieces constantly get stuck on the side of the knife, and then you have to wipe the sides of the knife off with your finger, and now your finger is all sticky. And you have to do this so many times...
Peeling garlic. Same sticky issue trying to get the skins off. I have a system for peeling that works well (and I know what one of you is thinking - crush it with the side of the knife, and it peels. Thanks for the tip, but that just is a bit too chaotic for my taste.)
Chopping onions. Serious crying ensues. Plus, as I chop, chunks always fly off the cutting board onto the floor, which irritates me no end—it really bugs me.
Back to the sausage issue. So I peel off the cover from the package of sausage, flip it over, and dump the brick into the frying pan. So far, so good. But here comes the part that I dislike: breaking it down into smaller pieces as it cooks.
I know, it's ridiculous, but there it is. The sausage is cold, a brick, and it takes a lot of wrist action and some muscle to get the job done, all while it is starting to sizzle and splatter some small drops of grease on my Lululemon t-shirt.
The thing is, I managed to catch myself and snap out of the trance my mind had put my mind in. I was lost in my own little mental world of whining and complaining that was bubbling up from some weird cauldron somewhere inside my skull free of charge.
It truly is a trance.
The problem? We are all of us in this kind of trance of thinking and talking to ourselves day in and day out. It is exhausting, to say the least. In this simple example, the thoughts about the sausage started to subtly create negative emotions.
Now you may be saying to yourself (see what I mean) so the f*%^ what, it is just sausage. But this process is a microcosm of what these trances of thinking can do to our daily moments, hours, and even days. It is a serious issue, beautifully framed by this quote from Frank Osteseski, the former director of the Zen Hospice Center in San Francisco and the author of the beautiful book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully:
“The habits of our lives have a powerful momentum that propels us toward the moment of our death. The obvious question arises: What habits do we want to create? Our thoughts are not harmless. Thoughts manifest as actions, which in turn develop into habits, and our habits ultimately harden into character. Our unconscious relationship to thoughts can shape our perceptions, trigger reactions, and predetermine our relationship to the events of our lives. We can overcome the inertia of these patterns by becoming mindful of our views and beliefs, and by doing so, we make a conscious choice to question those habitual tendencies. Fixed views and habits silence our minds and incline us toward life on automatic pilot. Questions open our minds and express the dynamism of being human.”
Becoming mindful. As I was whining to myself, I suddenly woke up and realized what was going on, and I immediately shifted my thinking to "look at this, you have the luxury of going to a store, buying any damn food you want without having to go out and forage or hunt, and it is damn good sausage at that so perhaps you should be grateful for all of your good fortune."
A shift from whining to gratitude. All made possible by the Waking Up meditation app and the timeless lessons and conversations there. Like working out our bodies, we need to work our minds to ensure we are not slaves to the trances that we all fall into. Practice when the stakes (or sausage) are not high, as it will train you for those bigger moments when a trance can lead you to say or do something you may later regret.
