Savor: An Important Word
Here’s my definition: to savor is to fully taste and feel the nuances and singularities of something. Food. A person. An object.
Savoring is important to me because it’s my way of knowing the world and knowing myself. Savoring - tasting all-dimensionally - allows me to not only learn about what I’m tasting, and also what I like/and what I don’t. What resonates with me/what doesn’t. It teaches me not only who I am, but who I can be.
Do you savor?
It takes openness to taste, to try. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t. Either way, I find that the uncertainty of not liking something is overcome by the certainty of learning something valuable.
I’ve been in a rut the past few months - a non-tasting, flavor-numb rut. Going through the motions of tasting whatever was easily available, in food and in life. Tasting takes curiosity and I had become tired. The virtuous wheel of find-taste-savor had come to a halt and I wasn’t getting the nourishment I needed to hunt.
Realizing the importance of savoring has reminded me where I get my energy. I must eat delicious things. I must see beautiful things. I must hear delightful things. I must see beauty in people.
So What About The Yucky?
Looking for the good and delicious doesn’t mean there is no bitterness or ugliness. Bitterness is just a backdrop where sweetness can shine. (Sweet and sour, anyone?!) I can appreciate the good in a person all the more knowing that that her good exists in spite of and beyond her faults. How much more amazing to see the impossible happen in a seemingly logical world. To see a plant in the middle of the desert or to meet your soulmate in a sea of non-soulmates.
How To Savor
So how can we savor on an operational level?
In a nutshell: attention and gratitude.
I found this out recently when I was offered the opportunity to say a prayer for washing hands. Washing hands! Such a mundane task, one we do several times a day. And yet, when I said the prayer, I noticed that saying it had forced me to stop and pay attention to the washing of my hands. I felt the water. I saw my hands. I felt my hands. This is tasting. I thought to myself that the water on my hands felt very nice, nicer than usual because it’s not something I notice...I’m usually hurry to dry them and get on to the next thing. Thinking and feeling the niceness was savoring.
To Taste is Polite, To Savor is Divine
We each have a piece of divinity within ourselves. It’s what makes us unique and worth tasting.
When we savor something divine in the world, the divine within and the divine without recognize each other and we can feel our own divinity.
This is how I knew that my hands and the water and this ritual of washing hands were divine.
Everything can be, and is, divine if we elevate it to the divinity within ourselves - if we only give it a bit of attention, since our human consciousness is divine. This is the very definition of prayer: attention and connection with the divine.
So bless this moment and notice the beauty in life and in people. Appreciate loveliness. It will make you smile and give you that divine glow.