This morning I ate my breakfast mindfully. That is to say that I ate my breakfast as opposed to shoving food in my mouth while my mind raced ahead towards the day, one hand on the cellphone checking for messages and eyes on the computer screen, with parts of me scattered all over time and space. It’s not a positive approach to the beginning of the day, is it? Taking care of nothing else except the act of making toast when I made the toast, smelling the bread as it warms. Noticing the small pop of the seeds as they toasted, thinking about the elements of nature contained within that slice of bread. The seed that grew to become wheat, the earth that welcomed the seed, the sun that warmed the earth, the wind that blew through the field on a summer day, the farmer who watched the wheat grow.
Because the mind is a busy puppy, it kept wanting to gambol off into memories of days when I also ran through fields of wheat and was kissed by the sun and stroked by the wind. The whistle of the kettle calls the puppy of my mind back to the task and taste at hand. I drink my coffee only drinking my coffee. I smile at the patterns made by the grains in the bottom of the cup, then turn my senses towards tasting the toast smeared with buttery butter and dripping with runny golden honey. The puppy in my mind again sniffs the hand of distraction but I call it back with the scent of honey.
“Imagine,” I tell that playful puppy, “imagine that you can taste the dance of the bees who made this honey. Just try one little taste. Think of the cow who ate the grass wet with morning dew and turned that into milk, that turned into butter. Think of the high mountains that grew the coffee now scenting the kitchen. See that in one small breakfast you are actually tasting the whole world; coffee from Colombia, butter from Denmark, bread with wheat from Egypt and the dizzying dance of bees from Saudi Arabia and know that you are a part of the world and the world is a part of you.” Eventually the puppy was seduced by the silence of sitting with my breakfast and slept under the table. One hour every day like this is my gift not to myself but to the world, to the day and to those around me who always thought I wasn’t a morning person. One hour is a start, imagine how calm I will feel when I can build this island of peace into a sovereign nation of freedom.
Dianne Sharma-Winter is a freelance writer living between India and New Zealand. She writes on travel, culture and humour using India as her muse.