Eating Some Fruit

An Exercise

When you feel so moved, grab a piece of your favorite fruit and eat it. Try to eat it as mindfully as possible – pay attention only to what is happening in that moment. Pay attention to taste and texture and the raw experience of the eating.

Now write about it. Put into words what that experience was like. Try to capture the fullness of it. Translate that experience into words.

When I have done this myself I have noted a number of things.

1. The experience is far more complex than I am able to capture in writing. My words automatically reduce the complexity of reality. The description of a thing doesn’t come close to accurately describing a thing in its fullness. As such language/reason is always removed from reality.

2. If I pay attention, I find that I am writing not about an experience, but about a memory of an experience. My memory may be more or less complete, but there has been some subtle shift from the direct experience to a mental image of the experience and it is clear to me that the mental image is very similar to a “dream” of that experience – it is a reshaping of what was.

3. I notice that I was not my eating. This may seem obvious, but it is an important insight. “I” did not eat the fruit, but rather “I” watched the fruit being eaten. At some level, I was merely a witness to the eating of the fruit which simply happened as I watched.

If you try this, let me know what happens for you.