Back in college, a friend and I had a conversation one day about ships and shoes and sealing wax and cabbages and ….. peas.  I grew up with a dad who never met a food he didn’t like.  Oh, he’d admit that some he liked better than others, but the concept of “not liking” a food was totally outside his comprehension.  This meant that we kids were raised with the expectation that WE would like all foods….. sooner or later.  “I’ve tried it a million times and I DON’T LIKE IT!!!” we would politely screech.  “But maybe THIS TIME you will!” was his never-changing reply.  No quarter given.  Unless it sent you into anaphylactic shock, you were expected to eat it.

He wanted us kids to be adventurous eaters, welcoming all foods, as easy to please as he himself was.  Admirable goal.  However, the effect his method had on me was quite the opposite of what he intended.  I reached adulthood a terribly picky eater, with sharply defined lists of Foods I Like (a not terribly long list) and Foods I Do NOT Like (a veeeery long list, indeed!).   I could go to a potluck at church with tables brimming over with dishes of every variety, and barely find enough “safe” food to fill my plate.  No anonymous casseroles for me, thank you!  And that one looks like it might have something strange in it.  I don’t recognize that vegetable.  …  You get the idea.

For some reason, my intense resentment against my dad’s insistence on liking everything, and on eating things which I already knew I didn’t like distilled itself most distinctly in a hatred of ….   Little.  Green.  Peas.  I hated them with a passion usually reserved for black mold, athlete’s foot, or lice.  Early in my friendship with Glenn at Whitworth, he had revealed to me that he, too, found the tiny, round things repulsive.  Nothing like a shared hatred to cement a growing camaraderie, right?  So, imagine my surprise – no, shock – when one day I discovered him eating peas.  Deliberately.  On purpose.  With willful, though not suicidal, intent.  When I asked him for an explanation, he gave an intriguing reply.  “I’m trying to get away from thinking about foods only in terms of what I ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’.  I’m trying to just train myself to think, ‘Ok, this is just what peas taste like.’”

I confess that, at the time, I didn’t really get it, and I can’t say it had much impact on my eating habits.  At least, not consciously.  But over the last ten years or so, little by little, I have been breaking out of my food prison, and those wise words of my friend have come back to me many a time.  In particular, I set myself the task of revisiting those foods that I was so sure I Did Not Like, to simply explore “What do those foods taste like, anyway?”  You see, for most of them, it had been so long since I actually even tried them that I had no idea!  The results have been pretty fun.  Many of those previously-rejected foods I have discovered I now like.  Even LOVE.  Cherries, avocados, figs, kiwi, oh, my!  Some foods I have confirmed the reason they were on my Do Not Like List in the first place.  Even the smell of canned salmon still makes me ill.  A host of other foods I have found that I can eat with equanimity by simply accepting that “this is what this food tastes like”.  I even gave peas a chance, and found that, cooked right, they’re not bad.  I’m still not the adventurous eater my dad was, and I don’t expect I ever will be.  That’s ok.  I’m me, not him.  But at least now I when I go to a potluck, I’m not worried about starving!  I’m gaining food freedom.

I’m finding a wider application of this principle as well.  Not surprisingly, food isn’t the only area of life wherein I have been so busy consigning things to specific positive or negative categories based solely on my own bias that I haven’t had time to learn to simply appreciate them for what they are.  People.  Music.  The way people dress.  Decisions people make.  By concentrating on evaluating these so that I can categorize them to a “Like” or “Do Not Like”, “approve” or “do not approve” I think I’ve missed out on a lot of life.

Obviously, some people I will immediately feel an attraction to, and some I will feel repulsed by, but the most important thing about someone shouldn’t be whether or not I like him, but who he IS.  I have found that I can learn to appreciate many good characteristics of someone that I don’t feel any particular affinity for.  I can even appreciate abilities of people I can’t stand when I look farther than just the fact that I don’t like them.  And for those few who I do not like and are consistently obnoxious, accepting that that is simply the way they are frees me from feeling in any way “surprised” at their actions and stops them from being able to control me by jerking my emotional chain.

I know all the reasons many people are prejudiced against tattoos, and I’ll agree that there are a lot of really ugly tatts out there.  For a lot of years, I had a reaction of “Ugh.  I don’t like tattoos.”  But in more recent years, I have learned to appreciate the beauty of the art that is in many of them, and more importantly, I have found that engaging someone in the “whys” of their ink can give me important insights into their life.  If all I do is say, “I don’t like tattoos”, then I have shut the door.  Tattoos are just art on PEOPLE.  Ordinary people.  I don’t want to give a tattoo the power to blind me to the person wearing it.

I don’t enjoy my son’s screaming mimi (Christian!) rock music – but if just say, “I don’t like it.  It’s bad.  It’s not really music.”  I’ve shut the door on ever being able to learn to appreciate what it is about the music that my son LIKES.  If I can accept the music as being what it is – “This is just what this music sounds like” – perhaps I can find a new way to relate to my son.  (…OK, there’s gotta be another way!!)

I have enough to do in this life without wasting so much time worrying about other people’s business, and whether I “like” or “do not like” what they’ve done.  In this new year ahead, I want to learn to just appreciate the experiences of life more and more, in and of themselves.   Whether I “like” it or not, I want to taste the flavor of life in all its fullness!

Happy New Year!  Peas, choy and loaves to all!