Habituated To Sweetness, How Can We Find Contentment?
Lent by the tongue to all the other sense organs, “sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.
Since then sweetness has lost much of its power and become slightly. . . well, saccharine. Who now would think of sweetness as a “noble” quality?...
Between bites [of birthday cake, my one-year-old son] Isaac gazed up at me in amazement (he was on my lap, and I was delivering the ambrosial forkfuls to his gaping mouth) as if to exclaim, “Your world contains this? From this day forward I shall dedicate my life to it.” (Which he basically has done.) And I remember thinking, this is no minor desire, and then wondered: Could it be that sweetness is the prototype of all desire?
Michael Pollan, The Botany Of Desire, p18-9
The promise of fulfillment paired with the sensation of sweetness - accomplishment and pleasure together - a rapturous combination. If sweetness is the prototype of desire, then its manifestation is nothing less than triumph.
When triumph’s arousal and heady rush have faded, we sit with contentment. In that moment, we are satisfied with our world, however disordered it may be. Contentment is an oasis.
Our relationship to sweetness has changed remarkably in the past 150 years. Sugars now are abundant. We gorge on them. We rot our teeth, the very tool necessary to incorporate sustenance and vitality into our body. Nature is not without irony.
We are accustomed to sweetness, the neon signal for fulfillment. We cannot see when we are filled, satisfied. What are we to do to be contented if we are habituated to contentment?
Musings
Reader Comments (2)
There are two schools of thought and several layers within each. I count a total of four possible combinations:
If Life is handing you lemons - do you notice the sweetness? MAYBE.
1. If you are so caught up in the sour of your life - you may miss something gloriously sweet altogether. This is because you are not really looking for or expecting anything good to happen to you. So you don't see it - even if it falls in your lap.
2. Alternately you might be so overwhelmed by something nice happening to you when life is so horrible that you come unglued. In this case sweetness can send you over the edge of how really icky everything else is by contrast. Bringing up grief and tears.
AND If you believe that life is sweet - do you still notice the sweetness. Again - MAYBE.
3. If you optimistically expect life to be sweet, you may not be really paying attention, and so may miss the sweetness of something that happens to you.
4. But if you are paying attention, and you appreciate it when life hands you something wonderful, you do notice the exquisite sweetness of good things.
So the key here - whether we're talking about a sugary molecule or an emotional situation -- is whether you are paying attention? Are you looking for sweetness, do you see it when it happens to you, and can you appreciate it when it appears?
It's up to you.
Gayle McCain
www.gaylemccain.com
Thanks for your awesome contribution to the blog :) And thank you for playing along with the way the smaller posts are set up to provoke thinking. Questions are more fun than answers.
You are so right to say attention is the key.
When something is so routine, can we effort attention? Wouldn't that be like straining to have fun?
I think Pollan suggests that If we are so used to having our desires satisfied, if we are so accustomed to sweetness, then can the pursuit of desire generate a worthy payoff?
I am habitually weary of the desires we chose to pursue. How did we chose them anyway?
At the end, I think you are right. When we pay attention to our choice of desires and pursuit of desires, then we might find a valued moment of "sweetness."