It’s been a long time since
I posted here. In between I’ve had a lovely intense week in Chiang Mai and up
in the hills near Fang, with a crew of six fun and congenial people doing cultural
immersion through food. Now I’m in Rangoon. The crows are cawing outside and
dawn is lighting things up in a pearly
way.
Last night as my flight was
coming in to land in Rangoon, there was a thick dark edge of night at the
horizon, and above it a limpid pale blue remnant of the day washed with streaks
of tender pink. The new moon lay on her back in a pale curve, already fuller
that the new-year sliver of two nights ago. It was a minute or two only, that glimpse,
and then darkness fell as we landed.
Reality on the ground was a
reminder of how much change there’s been in Burma in the last five years. Traffic
here gets thicker and more predictably impossible each time I come. Travel
times across the city have doubled and tripled. The heavy traffic is a
consequence of the government having lifted taxes on cars so they are affordable
to many more people. And that in turn is a sign of the improvement in quality
of life for many in central Burma since late 2011, as well as a cause of new
and greater stress for taxi drivers and other less affluent people: those who must
commute in the ancient crowded busses here.
I’ve been thinking about
time, its elasticity and its relentless march too, in my/our daily lives.
Cooking sessions with
Fern’s mother Khun Mae, who is a brilliant home cook from a village near Fang
in northern Thailand, are always a reminder that traditional methods of food
preparation do not allow for shortcuts. It takes the time it takes to reduce
the ingredients for a curry paste to the necessary even texture using a mortar
and pestle, or to chop meat to an even fine texture for laap or meatballs,
using a knife in each hand rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. When I was in rural Senegal
long ago I had an immersing lesson in just how long it takes to clean rice of
its husks in a mortar, or to reduce millet to fine flour in a mortar. There are
no shortcuts there. And any attempt to skimp on care results in wastefulness:
the food is not good or it is inedible or indigestible. And the cook’s job is
to make best use of the food resources she has.
This is why Rachel Laudan,
food historian and analytical thinker about food, is so forceful in reminding us
that modern equipment and food processing is a blessing, for it has relieved
many (mostly women) of the burden of hours of daily labour. (See her terrific recent book Cuisine and Empire.) Her great example,
presented at an IACP food history mini-conference in Mississippi some years ago, was the hours
that women in Mexico had to spend every day kneeling and grinding with a metate
in order to produce enough masa for the household. Now there are simple
machines that do that work. And the women thus have some hours available to do
other things, like earning money outside the home for example. That in turn
enables them to pay for schooling for their children. And so on…
So how much time do we have
freed up, in our machine-assisted world? And how do we use it?
That’s the other cluster of
questions my thoughts on “time” have been circling round. I’m not happy with
what I see myself doing sometimes. The clear spaces of open time that I need in
order to daydream, have fresh thoughts, and write are often eroded by my lingering
on this laptop of mine, trailing after this story or that, or rechecking the
Twitter feed or my email or (less compulsively) my Facebook pages.
It happened again last
night, as I was headed for bed, tired from a week of intense immersethrough
work. Instead of getting deep into my book (a pleasure I’d had on the plane), I
messed around on the computer reading articles I found linked on Twitter, and I also got caught up in the very seductive form
of Scrabble called Playing with Words that is now on my Samsung phone. Time slid
by and soon it was well after one in the morning.
It was fun, don’t get me
wrong. Two of my concurrent Scrabble games were with my kid Dom, who beat me
and then started two more matches with me. He’s on the other side of the world
in Toronto and it was a fun way of being in touch. Time sped by without my
noticing, ran away downhill, leaving me high and dry and overtire. And a part of me felt pretty stupid for having fallen down the rabbit hole once again.
But playing word games, reading
interesting articles, and catching up with news elsewhere are all fun and
absorbing pleasures, and let’s agree that pleasure is a wonderful part
of life. How lucky to have the time for it! Why do I spoil it by whining and
regretting after the fact? How silly.
I guess it’s my mother’s
voice from long ago echoing in me, critical of my “wasting time”. She died in her mid-fifties, far too young, so
perhaps somewhere in her bones was a deep knowledge that life is short and time
is precious. But in fact I’m sure she got the reflex from her judgmental
father, and passed it on.
It’s an attitude that casts
a sort of calvinistic pall over wanton time-frivolity.
And so I conclude that there’s
a balance to look for here on this "spending time," attitudes to time,
impatience-with-long-tasks front. I think it comes down to this: I need to try
to be present to the moment and in the moment.
On the one hand that means
putting in the necessary time, without rushing or trying to shortcut it, to do
whatever job I am doing (hideous vacuuming for example, or taxes) properly and thoroughly, however tedious. Of course
it’s a good idea to think ahead and see if there are ways of simplifying or
shortening or lightening the task. But once embarked on it, I need to just
settle in to doing it well and completely.
And on the other hand, when
it’s time for fun, it’s time for fun. And to second-guess and spoil that
pleasure by after-regret is to waste it. Right?
That leaves me with a motto/note-to-self something like this: Whatever you take on, whatever you spend time on, do it well and
whole-heartedly, and without regret.
Easier said than done, as
always!
