There’s a threshold where, once reached, hunger ceases to bother you. As though the body gave up against your persistence to starve yourself.
Why would anyone want to reach such limits? If you have access to food everyday, then it seems even more absurd.
It’s popular to say, “I don’t really enjoy food” – at least in my circles – and yet so persistently one may still find the rebel eating everyday. Of course they’d eat everyday, you may chide, since food is a necessity!
Well, to what extent does it become a necessity? If it is a necessity, why all the contingencies, the complicated ingredients and spices? Just because it is a necessity does not excuse the excessive path taken after.
Though it seems like I’m building up to gatekeeping the phrase, believe me, I’m not. I enjoy food as much as anyone else. But I enjoy hunger more, and I’ll tell you why.
Because the joy of food can be forgotten. It becomes ritualistic, then in the background, then almost a burden. Eventually people don’t eat to enjoy the food, they eat to get away from the pains of hunger. Or of other things.
Maybe more than once you’ve felt this uncomfortable duty to eat something, and then go down the rabbit hole of what exactly to eat, because the necessities and the niceties get all tangled up and, ironically, one is not necessarily in the most joy about the food when the planning decisions are all said and done.
Hunger makes only one demand on you: do you mind my presence?
And if you welcome it long enough, it even goes away after awhile.
There is no food to gather, nor put together – no outlets to drive to, nor people to consult. Hunger is a solitary activity, for the most part. Though one gains the potential burden of its presence, so one is freed by so many other things.
There is no more feeling ill or sick depending on what you eat. You get a huge chunk of your day back if you decide to fast the whole way through. And your body heals itself in the process. And your mind gets hockey-checked into a humility from taking for granted the food you had everyday. Persist long enough so a feeling of purity rises, a reset – it serves a reminder of all the energy you have available to you and yet most often squandered.
The reason I enjoy hunger more than food is simple: making a friend of hunger makes for more joyous days.