An Exercise in Ageless Wisdom

Try this simple mindfulness exercise and you will be putting a tidbit of timeless wisdom into action and probably having some fun also.

Devote a full ten or fifteen minutes to making your lunch.  Take your time.  Relax and focus.  Make your lunch as beautiful yet simple, as nutritious and yet delicious as you can.  Really put some thought and effort into it.  If you work outside the home, do this the night before or in the morning before you leave, and take it to work with you.

When it comes time to eat, give your lunch your undivided attention. Do not eat while reading, surfing the web, or anything like that.  Just sit and eat the food.  Think only about the food — about how pretty it is, how nice it tastes, how good for you it is, how wonderfully it is going to fuel your activities, what a blessing it is, and so forth.  Fully chew and taste every bite.

It just may be the best meal you’ve had in six months.

We can imagine Lao Tzu eating this way, or Solomon; we feel instinctively that an exercise of this nature  could be found as readily in a Buddhist temple as in a Catholic monastery or New Age retreat.   As elegant as  a Japanese tea ceremony or Ethiopian coffee-brewing, a meal such as this is as practical and fun today as it might have been in the court of Akhenaten or in a little cabin by Walden Pond.

Can we not say that this is indeed an example of the ageless wisdom?