My phone is swallowing me…but I used to eat my food without my phone.
Food is my meditation and I can die for it
I am not indebted to feel ashamed by using the word meditation in alignment with food. To those of you who have not poured spicy soup into the throat or have not chewed their chicken mindfully will never comprehend. Warm tea and coffee, Dosa, Hakka Noodles, Chole Bhature, Mutton Kosha, Egg Bhurji are some of my favourite dishes.
But I hate eating food with haste. Neither do I enjoy it by thinking about something while chewing food nor do I enjoy it while watching TV and texting.
One day a thought emerged unwittingly that hey ! I have been accustomed to enjoying a life like that of meditating over my foods for a long time. So let me have two things at the same time. Let me get enjoyment from something else. Two things mean eating my food with one hand and letting my phone control my mind from the other. Such habits have given me dissatisfaction on both ends. I never get content after finishing my food. But I avoided the fact that I was unconsciously committed to succumbing to the cycle of dissatisfaction. During my Food times in school days, I used to eat it without distraction. I used to eat it with mindful ease and pleasure. However, Television was present but less stimulus in comparison with smartphones.
Yes. You are familiar with it. We all do this right? So where is the problem?
We can see, we can touch and feel, we can smell, we can hear and we can taste. But how well you see it with focus, how well you hear and how profoundly you taste and smell are too deep questions to ask. So my obsessive phone habits have told me that I did not enjoy the food as much as I did before. Hence, eating my food with one hand and texting with the other is no more cool to me. Most importantly it is an incomplete sensation. Television was less tormenting when I used to be in school. It is less tormenting because in Television you can not chat. Thank God no such technology was developed back then in school that enabled chatting on TV. If that happened, my camouflaged good boy face would have revealed itself to my father.
I am not in relationship with you, I am in relationship with my phone
Distractions or not settling on one thing at a time is the consequence of desire and fantasies. We tend to get fed up with the most basic things in life such as eating food. That is why I did not focused on just eating food. Searching my own selfish motives in others and compensating it by the courses of day to day interactions are one form or another desires and fantasies. What my identity would be like to my new college friends was my concern. The skills that embody sociability are embedded right to our core but selfish attainment only was not actually me. Hence, seeing the world through the lens of desires is falsehood. It is also questionable whether we are genuinely interested in other people or not. We are just genuinely interested in us in an obsessive manner. During such a process, the unadulterated reality gets distorted. We are chatting on the phone to represent our identity to others. No problem, but there is “I” “I” and “I” all the time. The self obsessed “We” are unable to detach ourselves from us. At the same time, we are no longer seeing people as they are. We are seeing them from our own perceptions and impose our perceptions to understand a person who is completely different than us. Not only that, We are seeing them as a machine that can transact our motifs, expectations, desires and fantasies. We are bound to expect things from others, We are human but some people has already surpassed the limit of expectations. As a result, we tend to get fed up with the most basic things in life such as eating food. As a result, we mix TV and our smartphones with our food. Very very wrong combination. I agree how critically I stretched the matter of eating food to desires and fantasies. But if constant experiences are proving to be a cause of misery and dissatisfaction, then there is a certain hypotheses implicitly lying on the surface that says you should look into it….. and ask why?
