People who chew too little and swallow too quickly do not enjoy the taste of their food. They miss the flavour of every mouthful, and the integrity of every unique aroma that makes the taste buds excited and commands nerve impulses to send sensations of pleasure to specific little cells. Without this experience, eating becomes just one more of the duties in our life — a bundle of mechanical movements that make the needle on the scale rise, while the finer observations around preparation, sitting down, serving out, being together and the privilege of abundance and of variety all go, uninterpreted, to waste. Smaller actions do not get taken up into the weave of the moment; appreciation for nuances that, layer upon layer, anchor the atmosphere in depth, is scraped together with the leftovers into the dog's bowl.

The same happens with our days when they are bitten off in pieces too large, chewed too quickly, and swallowed whole in chunks. The flavour of the moment, the aroma of the relationship, the moisture of a deeper emotion and the anointing of a feeling of fulness — meant to plant roots and legends inside our day — pass us by. Superficial stimuli that can never be converted into either fuel or building-material stand in a queue before our senses to lay claim to our time and energy; an exciting and attractive alternative, overloaded with instant and high-tech possibilities that at a bewildering pace overrun our daily menu, and that guarantee adrenaline for speed junkies.

We doctor everything with instant solutions and never consider poor digestion as the cause of the emotional ailments that ache in our hearts. Because teeth that have grown blunt swallow moments whole, and let them lie down, indigestible, in our spirit. Our spirit must process our impulses, our longings, our disappointments, our joy and our deferred hope, and not, under pressure and haste, to give meaning to these organic processes.

For that reason we must keep our days from running through our lives flavourless — one like the next — without our tasting, in our spirit, the ecstasy of a stretched-out moment and allowing its satisfaction and its wholesomeness to slide slowly against our personality. A moment that, within the limited borders of time, generates its own gravity, a gravity within which the impact of a handful of trifling seconds swallows up the eternity behind us and the eternity ahead of us, and makes the moment larger than the space inside our heart. A moment within which we are remade to be softer, tenderer and more merciful. A womb-moment, with an umbilical cord between our hearts and an awareness of eternity, preparing us for life, but also for death. A moment too large for your heart to put into words, that now lies softly in eye contact.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer