The Art of Digesting, A Life Full of Patience

Photo by Lidye on Unsplash

Just give it to me! Give me the damn advice and get on with it! AGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! I imagined Cartman from South Park.

It kind of feels like that sometimes. We are so hurried all the time. It’s 8:18 am for me as I write this. And, at precisely 8:30 am, I will leave my laptop, get up, and put my running sandals on to go for a blessed, refreshing, and deeply loved morning run.

This leaves me with just a couple of minutes to write now. I’ve been reading an interesting article about the great French blogger Michel de Montaigne for the last hour or so. Preparing. Preparing to write about something, looking for a golden nugget of advice. Advice that often comes not straightforwardly, but tangentially.

When I set about looking for ideas, I usually believe I am looking for something specific in the texts I read, but then, as if sparkled by the ideas of the great writers, my mind bursts into flames, and from the fire throws the idea that I was really looking for to my streams of thought. And today, that idea is the one of digestion, life’s digestion, the proper digestion of life. The idea of mindful chewing. Which can only be practiced through patience.

There is no way I will be able to finish this in 10 minutes. Nor should I want to finish it in such a short amount of time. I’ve written quite a few articles in a rush in the past, and they just don’t really click. And the reason for that, I believe, is that I am not patient enough with my words and with my thoughts.

If we were to use food as an analogy, I would say that I find myself not chewing my food, I don’t let my writing happen as it needs to happen. I don’t pause and think about what I want to say. I don’t reflect on whether my words feel true or not. I just want to get to the other side, and fast. Eating everything in one big gulp and on to the next thing.

And that is precisely the problem.

Why do we want to be so efficient? Why do we always have to be doing something for the sake of something else and not the thing itself? Always looking for returns?

The problem we are dealing with here is that we never truly experience what we are doing at any given moment, to the fullest. Because we are always striving to some…