Profound thought for the Task
The moment you realise you are not present, you are present
– Eckhart Tolle
The Task: Find something to eat (biscuit / banana /apple) and eat it as S L O W L Y as possible. Write down how long it took and tell your wife.
What a stupid task, I thought as I unfolded the next bit of paper that I picked from the eggbox. Not very stimulating is it? I suppose I do usually eat things quite quickly though, so maybe my wife is trying to teach me a life lesson or something. I have heard of slow eating doctrines before – people that advocate slow eating as a way of life or for a healthier something or other – so perhaps it would do me good to try to do it properly. And if I were to do it properly, how should I approach it? I reckon a slow-eaten biscuit wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes; a banana, perhaps 20 minutes at a push. An apple could last longer I suppose – maybe half-an-hour or so – so that would make a better candidate.
As it happens we have an apple peeler – a marvellous invention that magically peels and cores apples with the twist of a handle. It leaves you with a wonderful spiral of apple, alongside a continuous string of peel. My thoughts were that I would eat the yummy apple fruit first, and then the yukky peel afterwards – thus making for a longer overall eating time.
So, after having carefully peeled the apple using the peeler, I measured the peel and was delighted to find that it was in one continuous length of about 2 and-a-half metres. That meant I would be able to slowly chew on the peel for hours after having eaten the apple. (I threw away the apple core because I didn’t want to slowly eat my way through that!)
It was a fine afternoon, so I wandered over to the beach with a book, and started eating my apple as slowly as possible. The actual apple was sweet and juicy, and because it was in spiral form, I could slowly feed it into my mouth piece by piece. It was a bit like a ticker-tape machine in reverse, I thought. I’m not sure if people remember what ticker-tape machines were like, but I just googled it to find out if they are still a thing, and they haven’t been a thing since about 1970. That’s how fashionable my thoughts are!
The apple itself took about half-an-hour to eat, wheras with my normal eating speed this would have been about 4 minutes. So this was a slow start. Eating at such a slow speed you have to place an apple portion onto your tongue and then gently squeeze the juices across the palette and resist the temptation to bite. The portion will start to disintegrate naturally quite quickly, and you don’t really need your teeth to break it up, although it’s more satisfying to hear a slight crunch and deliver a little bit more juice using the teeth. I’d put a portion in my my mouth, read a paragraph or two from my book, and/or gaze into in the distance at the sea for a while before introducing the next bit of apple.
The apple took about 30 minutes to gorge, at which point I was forced to start on the peel. Bit-by-bit I slowly munched on the peel. I felt a bit like a punched-tape machine in reverse I thought, before realising that this thought was even more unfashionable than the ticker-tape one.
As most people know, apple peel isn’t the most delicious of foodstuffs. It’s not horrible though, it just has a chewy, light-plasticky texture with only the vague hint of juicy loveliness to redeem itself. However, I could sit on the beach and let my mind drift into other worlds while the mouth munched away at the skin and automatically fed the next bit in. I’m sure there were a few people on the beach who were regarding me suspiciously. Was that a man eating string, they might have thought?
Eventually the string came to an end. I glanced at my stopwatch. It was over an hour since started eating the apple. Surely that was the exact definition of SLOWLY eating. I reckoned I had met the challenge admirably. (or admirably met the challenge depending on how you prefer adverbs placed and infinitives split).
The final reckoning was 1 hour and two minutes exactly. I wrote this down in the back of my book for future people to find. All I had to now was tell my wife.
The moment you finish eating your apple, you realise it’s not present.
