My mother often used to say to me: 'I cried because I had no shoes until I saw a boy with no feet.' This was a constant reminder of both how lucky I was to have the things I had and to never entertain envy or greed.
In today's society we value materials more than actual experiences and increasingly we have become jealous and covetous of our neighbour. Yet, never has there been a story where someone has learned an important lesson in life from a new pair of shoes or a flashy new car.
British neurologist, Oliver Sacks, died recently after spending a lifetime helping others. I have read his book 'Awakenings' and recently re-watched the film by the same name. Sacks, portrayed by Robin Williams, administered a drug (L-Dopa) to catatonic patients who had survived 1917-28 epidemic encephalitis lethargica. After decades of catatonia, patients were 'awakened' and re-experienced what it means to 'be alive.'
In one scene, patient Leonard Lowe, portrayed by Robert De Niro, excitedly tells Sacks, that people need to be reminded how wonderful life is, that it's a gift and that people shouldn't be walking around with glum faces.
Sadly, the patients 'awakening' had a limited duration and gradually the patients all returned to a catatonic state, their new lifes short lived.
Leonard would be even more upset by the state of modern society today. Rather than collecting moments we are too busy collecting things. Children are increasingly being bought off, we no longer have the time to make camps with them in the garden or collect things for the nature table at school (do they even exsist anymore?) We don't bake, or have regular sit down meals with our children, rather, we consign them to their bedrooms where they are constantly met with a barrage of violent images from their TVs and computers. And if we do take them out, it's not rock pooling or blackberrying, it's Legoland or McDonald's, the premise being, if we're paying for it, it must be good. As parents, we are our children's first line of defense, yet we are so caught up in possessions that creating cherished memories and teaching that happiness comes from within and cannot be measured by material gain, has somehow passed us by.
You may ask, what has this to do with a food blog? Well, shocking research which informs us that a third of primary pupils think cheese is a plant and 1 in 10 thinking a tomato grows underground, along with 85% of children across all ages saying they would like to learn to cook yet are denied the opportunity, is pertinent I think.
As we approach the weekend, we should think about Leonard Lowe, who realised during his short re-birth, that life is very precious. Rather than trawling the shops for more random things which will only make us happy temporarily, we should spend the weekend creating memories, providing us and our children with a variety of stories to tell, stories that cannot be found on a computer screen.
'It makes you aware of the knife-edge we live on.'
- Doris Lessing (quote on awakenings)
'Owning fewer keys opens more doors.'
- Alex Morritt
Have a great weekend.
Love Donna xxxxxxxxx
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