When I started my quest to educate and heighten my senses, I had set an alarm to ring regularly and remind me to focus on hearing, touching, tasting, seeing and smelling. I would stop everything and just absorb every hour or two the whine of the buzz-saw or the hypnotic tinkle of wind chimes, the gag of diesel from a passing truck and the sandalwood of a matron’s perfume, the taste of a bleeding tongue or the delightfulness of a morning coffee, the rough rasp of the pock-marked pavement on my bare feet or the sensuousness of a massage with oil extracted from orange peels.
The intense pauses of contemplation are useful, even necessary. But the pauses are starting to become superfluous.
I wrote my previous post, on umami, with the television on in the background, tuned to a National Geographic program about martial arts. The TV crew was interviewing a karate master.
The master said that his students are trained with such intensity that they should be able to fight with lethal efficiency even while thinking about what they’re going to do at work the next day. They should be able to overthrow a deranged attacker and smash his kneecap while thinking: “Oh yeah! I should download that new PowerPoint presentation and use it as a template.”
That’s what I want. But gently, gently, sensually - with the five senses. It must become natural, constant, subconscious.
Yesterday, I met a friend who was helping me out with my visa troubles.
He was also reading my blog. He called me “a bit crazy” for devoting my life to this.
Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. But that’s not the point.
I remember all the details of our conversation. I also can feel the staccato of the jackhammer on the nearby concrete that forced him to strain his larynx. My fingers can still feel the grooves and grains and weight and stamp edges and indents of the visa papers I handed him. Even now I can smell the stale fug of old deep-fryer grease that was magnified because our surroundings were closed off in an attempted buffer to the outside noise. The sight and sound, as I was leaving, of the sooty workmen crunching fist-sized apples during a break.
And that’s the point. It’s the point where the mundane becomes the sensational.
No, I’m not there yet. But I have a goal.
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