Month: Sep 2020

When are we intimate with others?

Being intimate with someone in a conversation is a deeply moving and lasting experience. We feel that we have been fully understood for once, in a world where we are largely misunderstood. Swirling, cascading feelings of closeness, belonging, connection, satisfaction. The mind is flooded with good chemicals. We feel refreshed, renewed… more human. But, at the end of the day, when you review your conversations with others – if, like me, you do – do you remember feeling really intimate with another person? Take today for example. Most of the things I talked about with family members were practical and tied to daily concerns. When is it, exactly, that we are intimate? Even when we are with our closest friends, family or significant others, intimate conversations do not happen all the time. They are reserved for special occasions. As a young man in search of love, and as a writer and a human, I think the quest for intimacy and someone to have it with is one of the key quests of my life, if it is not the only one. Such is the importance and relevance of this topic: the conditions of intimacy. That experience of being fully understood which is apart from our normal, transactional conversations.

Having intimacy depends on both sides of a conversation. There has to be a type of perfect reciprocity which is rare in life, since we are all usually in a different head space at different times. For intimacy to occur, one has to be receptive and so does the other. One has to let down one’s guard, so does the other. One has to be willing to confide and think deeply, and so does the other. Such conditions seem to require the apparatus for serious thinking: time, relaxation, privacy, lack of distractions, a strong feeling in the mind, absolute sociability, the support of a strong and long-lasting relationship.

Yet there are also exceptions. Sometimes, one is most intimate with strangers. I believe there is a psychological term for this, when one opens up to someone one doesn’t know. I forget it for the moment. Perhaps this form of intimacy is even more psychologically interesting than the more conventional form. Is it based on a type of daring? Or does it seek to free itself from the burdensome judgement of people we have known for an age? Is it a more liberating and productive form of intimacy in building relationships?

What does it say about the human condition that we don’t have intimacy always? Perhaps we cannot trust all the time, and perhaps this is natural, given what other human beings can be like. Perhaps we wear armour for most of the days of our lives, an impenetrable skin which does not let others inside or for us to go outside of ourselves and live in an other for a while. If connection is so energy sapping and such a leap and expenditure of trust and risk, such an invitation for potential misunderstanding or even hurt, then intimacy may be the rare and choice fruit of our lives. We are not always fully understood. Which is why intimacy is so special and fulfilling. Yet one imagines a world where we can all be intimate with each other, fully understood. Perhaps this is the ultimate, if not expressed and recognised, goal of the human condition. To be fully, finally, understood.

Decisive Dinners and Chow Choices

Food is simple, right? But consider. A predictable predicament. Friends, family, work, any social situation. One person wants to eat Chinese. Another one wants Mexican. A third Italian, a fourth American fast food. One is vegetarian. One is vegan. One is pescatarian. One is an environmentalist. One is a health fanatic. How to choose?

When I was a simple and trusting child, the idea of choosing what to eat in any meal I had never entered my mind. I would simply just eat whatever my mother gave me. Even if I didn’t like what was made, I had to eat it. Rebellion or the imagination of something different wasn’t even present as a remote possibility. We had a rule that we could only get up from the table if we finished the food that was in front of us. It was only when I was a teenager that I started eating what I wanted and chose to eat, and, even then, my mother still largely dictated what was on the table.

Fast forward to the present moment for most people, the ones that haven’t stubbornly (ignorantly?) remained the child I was. The food landscape has completely changed. There is more choice, a bewildering number of cosmopolitan world food choices. Authoritative discourses around food abound. There are scientific demands for a five a day and various health and ‘brain foods’. Add to this all the potential negatives surrounding the idea of food nowadays: the nagging thought of impending environmental crisis and the adult awareness of global systems of inequality and unfairness in terms of food production. Not to mention the atrocious conditions of suffering of animals led to the slaughter. Food choices are not so simple any more. Moreover, they are heavily and unavoidably politicised and tied to feelings of guilt and moral reprehensibility. Is the meal I’m going to eat going to result in the disinheritance of the children to come, the taking away of the good things of the world? Has this chocolate bar been produced by modern day slaves?

The amount of thinking time given to decision-making around food choices has exponentially increased since I was a child, in the span of thirty years or so. What has changed? When I was a child, I could simply trust the older generation and eat what they gave me. Now the scenario has changed. We cannot trust the older generation any more. New knowledge has usurped the system of deference and obedience. There has been a veritable explosion of words around the idea of food. We are faced with the existential crisis of knowing, of being forced into independence and moral responsibility. Our food choices have become difficult ethical choices that cry out for education and knowing. We have to research everything that we eat before we put it into our mouths. It is no longer a question simply of what tastes good, what is traditional.

Is this emphasis on decision and choice, the time it takes, such a burden? There are some positives. In many ways, the current burden of decision over food choices takes us back to the primordial past of humanity. Then, when the human race was exploring what was edible and what was not, there was a massive risk. What one ate could have made one sick, even fatally so. But ultimately, the courage and hardihood required to chew on anything and everything led to the knowledge of what could be eaten and what was useful and productive to eat. Like then, the current situation of hard food choices and risks promises to lead to a better tomorrow and more sustainable and healthier food, as well as a fairer food community. For those that have not remained the child I once was.