I grew up in a very different world than today. My mother and my grandmothers often tried to train me to follow social rules, moral rules. I am not sure that is practiced very often in the world we live in today.
This phrase that I often heard as a child, “stop playing with your food,” popped into my head this morning and made me smile at what my mother and grandmothers were trying to teach me when they said it to me and what I believe it to be now.
They were trying to make me realize that it was not socially acceptable to play with food (not very polite).
I now believe that they were right, but not because of the social rules of acceptability.
Happiness & enjoyment
We all want to be happy and enjoy life. Many people believe that they should figure out what makes them happy and go after it. I have found that happiness and enjoyment are much simpler than that, and in some ways more complicated.
The simple observation that I made years ago is that people are not satisfied until they convince themselves that they are satisfied, in other words, we convince ourselves of our happiness, it’s again, as I keep saying, an internal process and nothing physical.
So if you want to be happy, you should teach yourself (through training and practice) to be happy, and the simplest things in life will end up making you happy. From there you can never go wrong.
Practice again
As I always say, there is nothing you cannot achieve if you train yourself.
If you want to train for happiness, it makes sense to start with the simplest things: Eating, drinking, cleaning yourself, brushing your teeth, combing your hair, breathing, sleeping. These are the basic things in life, and if you find happiness in them, everything else is a cakewalk.
So now I go back to that phrase that came to me this morning, “stop playing with your food,” that my mother and grandmothers taught me many years ago, and I think to myself, “if they only knew.
When you eat with intention, when you eat with focus, when you eat with your whole self, when you eat with grace, when you eat to feel happy, remember that this food is energy for your body, it gives you life, it sustains you, it moves you forward, it becomes a part of you, it makes you happy.
If you can find all that again, you will surely be able to find happiness in your life again, because you know how to find happiness in the smallest things, of course all the big pieces will fall into place very easily.
Stay educated,
Aviram
