A Peanut Morning
How could Clair de Lune put anyone in a rage?
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.
Humans have an in-built tendency to pay as much attention to things they don’t like as things they do. But now that tendency is crippling us, mostly because the things we don’t like seem to be proliferating. Are they are actually proliferating? Or could this be an illusion generated by the toxic combo of a 24-hours news cycle, clickbait headlines and social media’s panicky amplification? It hardly matters, when the effect on our collective psyche is so profound. If we want to build a better world, we are going to need to start feeling better (individually) no matter what external stressors are present so that we can remain functional and positive rather than raging at the breadsticks.
I shared the buffet table metaphor with one of my offspring recently, and on the “peanut morning”, that much-loved person bounced it back to me. I’m someone who has struggled, for about thirty years, to relax. It’s easy to classify your own dysfunction as normality, not challenging it on the basis that “this is who I am”. Then two decades of tension start compressing your cervical vertebrae, causing problems in your vestibular system, and you have to start looking for the cause. Hello, locked-tight trapezius! Are you doing your impression of a yoke?
So there I was, making an effort (ha ha! ruined it already) to relax. I searched Spotify for a ‘relaxing classical music’ playlist, and had it playing through the TV. Subliminally at first, I started registering the images accompanying each track. Man, man, man, man. I mean, of course, because we’re mostly talking 19th-century composers: Ravel, Debussy, Chopin. The female music of earlier eras got obliterated or credited to their husbands. But sometimes the photo was of the (current, living) musicians. You know where I’m going with this. Man in a suit. Man at the piano. Man in a waistcoat, crouched in a field looking moody. Man, man, man, man.
Then at last, there was a woman.
She was naked.
Actually, she wasn’t naked; she was in a skin-coloured dress with near-invisible straps, but the photographer had made sure that she looked naked at first glance. My offspring entered at this point, and I had a little rant. It’s bad enough that it’s so hard for a woman to become a successful musician, but even worse that when they do, they are marketed as sex objects. Look at Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, same thing basically, hugely successful singer-songwriters, but you don’t see Ed Sheeran singing in his underwear. Why couldn’t that (one) woman on the playlist be depicted fully clothed (including natty waistcoat), crouched in a field looking moody? Why was she the only one exposing acres of flesh?
“Having a peanut day, are we?” said Offspring. “A peanut morning,” I corrected. Because it’s good to remember we have the power to stop. Move one’s attention to a neutral bread and butter lunchtime, and a more uplifted cheesecake afternoon.
There will always be nauseating things on life’s buffet table. I have learned that, on the whole, it is wise to keep those things out of my mouth.
This was a very early post. Not many people liked it because I had hardly any subscribers then. Make this post feel loved. Press the heart! And also…
Thank you Ros. Your post gives me a new perspective on my occasional (but always annoying) habit of commenting on everything I dislike while watching TV (advertisements are the worst trigger) or films. I'm not adding value, I'm obsessing over peanuts!! Maybe I thought I needed to educate those around me on the world's shortcomings. All I did was reveal an inability to understand my important role in making this immediate world a better, calmer place. I might have listened to my inner coach, "If it's really bothering you, girlfriend, leave the room." Or, follow some old fashioned advice: as Ma used to say in Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books, be cheerful, bestir yourself, let's get to work.
I loved this! A peanut morning. It’s such a useful phrase. My Dad used to designate certain days “doggy days”. We’re not entirely sure what he meant - I think it meant days when he felt like signing “it’s a doggy daaaayyy” in a goofy dad voice. I’ve co-opted this. And now I have “peanut mornings”. Except I love peanuts. Thank you for this delightful read and your impactful analogies!