What Are You Chewing?

You sat down to plan the day, and twenty minutes later you are still going over the thing someone said to you yesterday. You did not choose to. The mind brings it back up and works it again, and again, the way your tongue keeps going to a piece of food stuck in your teeth. You are always chewing on something. The only questions are what, and whether you should be swallowing it.

It matters more than it sounds, because you become what you chew. The article you skimmed does nothing to you. The insult you have gone over forty times is part of how you see yourself now. What passes through your mind in a second leaves nothing behind. What you keep in your mouth all day is what feeds you, or what poisons you.

So the first thing is to pick what goes in. Left alone, the mind grabs whatever is nearest, and the nearest thing is usually the argument you lost or the worry you woke up with. So keep something better within reach: a problem you actually want to solve, a line worth knowing by heart, one good thing about a person who is annoying you. Keep the good food where your hand falls first, and the junk a little harder to get to.

Then give it time. A hard truth, a real grief, a piece of advice that stung: none of them give up much on the first quick bite. They open only when you go slowly and come back more than once, and the taste comes out in the chewing, not before it. And do not take in more than you can handle. You would not swallow a whole meal in one go, and a whole book or a whole sorrow is the same. What you cannot digest just sits there and turns your stomach.

And know what to do with something bad. You cannot always tell before it is in your mouth, so you try it. But the moment it turns bitter, or sits in you like a stone, you spit it out and you do not go back for more. Resentment, a failure, a fear of what might happen: chew on those and you get no goodness out, only more of the poison, until you slowly become the thing you keep chewing on. You do not have to keep eating a bad meal to remember it made you sick. Keep the one lesson, and spit out the rest.

You are going to chew all day, on something. Make sure it is worth the taste it leaves.