"The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing."
- Jon Kabut-Zinn
Can you name the five senses? Working with children, it is amazing how often they name almost all of them. It never fails. They start out strong naming each sense with resolve. They get to number 4 and their confidence begins to crumble. They grasp at four only to be left with the frustration of being unable to name the fifth sense. As a writer teaching children to write, taste seems to be what they mostly forget. It's hard to transfer taste into writing. But for any number of reasons people always seems to find it hard to come up with the a final sense.
It's really got me thinking if this inability to grasp the senses is directly related to our disconnection from them. On a given day, we are bombarded with visual and auditory stimulus. I wonder if it works to drown out the senses of smell, taste, and touch. Can the practice of mindfulness help us reset and tune into the powerful senses that truly allow us to live more vibrant lives? Mindfulness can be formal or informal. Formal mindfulness is akin to meditation. This is when you focus on one thing and requires time and a quiet place to practice. Informal mindfulness is a less structured. The most important thing here is staying focused in the present. Take a moment while cooking dinner to focus your senses on the task of preparing the meal. Listen as you chop the broccoli, sear meat in the pan, or the sound of pans as they bang together. Focus on the aroma of the food as it cooks. While in the kitchen, there is no shortage of food to enjoy. Taste what you are cooking. Fruits and veggies in their raw state have a crisp clean taste that you may find refreshing. Feel the heat from cooking and note the textures of the food as you prepare them. Create an asthetic plating of your culinary masterpiece or set the table being mindful of how it all looks.
My journey to mindfulness has been small, but I am finding a joy in cooking that I never knew existed. In fact, if you asked me a month ago if I enjoyed cooking, I probably would have wrinkled my nose and the look on my face would have shown my disdain for the practice. Honestly, I still don't enjoy giving up the time it takes to cook. However, I have learned to enjoy it. I take time to be mindful. This in turn has allowed me to enjoy food more allowing me to be more mindful in what and how I am eating. Just like a writer incorporate sensory details to engage their audience, mindfulness allows us to engage in the world in a more bold and authentic way.