I am in Manhattan until Friday and had lunch at Chef’s Street at Macy’s a couple of days ago. I shared a table with a stranger who suggested gelato from a restaurant on the store’s sixth floor.
I do enjoy gelato but told her I’d pass, that I’m cutting back on sugar (that day’s breakfast — Nutella Packed Jacks — had enough of it!). But she urged me: “Get the gelato; enjoy your life.”
I smiled and didn’t say what I was thinking: that I do enjoy my life, when I make food choices that don’t end in sugar comas or bad moods or food babies.
But how often we pick fleeting pleasure without discerning first whether fleeting pleasure is worth enduring what may follow, which is likely to last longer than what caused it in the first place.
And this isn’t just in dessert. It’s not just gelato and sugar coma versus no gelato and having a body that functions. It’s in relationships. It’s in who we pick and how we spend our time with each other.
So today, I urge you:
Think ahead a little; enjoy your life, not just brief encounters with fleeting pleasures between longer periods of having to undo what didn’t have to be done.