Lunch at work: Spinach, red onion and toasted walnut salad with apple cider vinegar and lemon cucumber spa water
When is the last time you truly tasted something? For me, it's been quite awhile. I get so wrapped up in writing a shopping list or watching the latest episode of Lost that I forget that I am even eating. Mind you, I eat pretty well: vegetarian, organic as much as possible, good mixture of colorful fruits and veggies, and whole grains when I can. But being a conscious buyer and preparer does not necessarily portend being a conscious eater.
After a Midwest vacation filled with Southern Creole, honey mead and greasy brewery fries, my accomplice and I have decided to try our hands (or stomachs) at a "cleanse". We both know that we could never do an all out, liquid only diet for any amount of time without strangling eachother and quite possibly ourselves, so we are instead choosing the path of slightly less resistance: the raw diet. For 7 days we will eat only fresh fruits and veggies (and legumes, etc) with no added sugars, fats or salts (that'll be the hard one).
Naturally, I woke up this morning of Day 1 with utter dread. I'm normally a bagels and cream cheese kinda gal, and I like my omelettes and quiches on the weekend, so the prospect of mere fresh-squeezed orange juice and fruit salad, however colorful, hit me as less than tempting. But, I made it through and was surprisingly full after what I expected to be a pretty meager meal.
For my one hour lunch break, having forgotten a book to read, I stared out the window over the airport near my building and tasted spinach for the first time. Of course I've eaten spinach before, but I'm not sure if I've ever tasted it and really let it's earthy green-ness engulf my senses. A lunch I had dreaded for lack of taste turned out to be quite a wake up for my taste buds.
It's somewhat natural to apply what I learn from food to my life since, for the most part, food IS life for me. Perhaps I'm hallucinating for lack of sustenance, or perhaps I'm just emotional easing back into the grind after 5 days of vacation, but I realized that I truly don't taste enough in my life.
Traveling, no matter how near or far, always makes me think of other travel experiences. And so it is that I find myself thinking of a few summers ago in Israel: I was sitting on a rooftop balcony at my hostel when a large group of Israeli female soldiers came out to join me on a break from lecture. They were young, just out of high school.
Two of them were curious about me: wanted to know where I was from, what I was doing there, how long I would stay. I will never forget the amazement in their eyes when I told them I had a degree in French and Business, and was just 23 years old. They thought I was so accomplished and so smart. They had just begun their 2+ years of IDF service, and many of them had plans to get married after their service was over, and perhaps bear children shortly thereafter. A college degree, for them, was at least as far away as their 25th birthday, if not further.
I dismissed their awe and chalked it up to our cultural differences, even our gap in age. How could I, 23 years old with no grad school plans or chosen career path, be inspiring to anyone?
It wasn't until after I returned home, to the high paced life of job applications and rush hour traffic, that I realized I needed to give myself more credit. I think we all do. It seems the IDF serves, for some, as a forced period of reflection between high school childhood and the adult beyond. With that in mind, I started to envy these girls in their military fatigues, given the time to pause and look around, decide what they want for their lives and celebrate where they've come from. What would I have done differently if I'd taken a hiatus after each accomplishment in my life?
A life without reflection, celebration and occasional indulgence is not worth much. It will sustain you, but it won't do you justice: just like a meal without taste.
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