A Peanut Morning

How could Clair de Lune put anyone in a rage?

Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay

I was having a peanut morning. I don’t like peanuts, so this is not a good thing. At primary school, my headmaster Mr Hancock stood over me and forced me to eat a peanut folded into a lettuce leaf. I threw up on his shoes. If you have eaten peanuts within the last hour, I will try not to be in the same room as you because the smell makes me gag. I love raisins, but I can’t eat raisins if they’ve been knocking around with peanuts, the same way I can’t be friends with people who hang out with racists. Though I once accidentally married a racist, but that is another story.

Getting away from racists (always a good thing) and back to the peanuts, there were no actual peanuts in my peanut morning. They were imaginary peanuts arising out of a metaphor whose greater purpose is to encourage a person to (deliberately, wilfully) create a better life. By ‘better’, I mean happier, more fulfilled, more pleasurable.

That might sound selfish, but depressed and despairing people don’t tend to be great at helping people, let alone uplifting humanity during dark and scary times. (I know, because I was one.) They have no room for other people because they are using all their energy just to keep their heads above the waterline. And let’s say you’re not in suicidal despair, just a bit worried about the state of the world and/or the security of your job, and/or prone to moaning about that irritating person who emails you all the time about the same thing under multiple proliferating subject lines. You’re still not going to be much of a remedy during humanity’s existential crisis. So (selfishly) creating your own more fulfilled and pleasurable existence is actually a service to others, of the classic ‘put your oxygen mask on first’ variety.

This is the life-improving metaphor: look at existence as a buffet table. There are so many things in front of you. Peanuts. But also spicy chicken wings, cheese puffs, tofu and spinach quiche, amaretto biscuits, celery, cherries, pineapple pizza, breadsticks, caramel shortbreads, katsu curry, and cheesecake. Something in that list probably doesn’t appeal to you. Make that the metaphor for your least favourite politician, global warming, or misogynists. You wish it didn’t exist, but there it is, staring you in the face. But that’s great because you don’t have to eat everything on the buffet table. You get to choose what you put on your plate. 

Social media has been training most of us to do this: stand in front of the breadsticks saying, “What is the point of breadsticks? So dry! So tasteless! A joke of a food. Pointless calories. Why have they put them out? Who even eats those? Idiots!” The end result: you feel angry, but the breadsticks are still on the table. A better tactic is to pass them by and grab yourself some cheesecake.

It’s not all down to social media.