Eating with Chopsticks (left-handed)

The child, being mine, is as comfortable with chopsticks as she is with a fork. We go out for various Asian foods regularly and she’s offended if the serving staff brings her a fork, assuming she’s too young or too Caucasian to handle sticks. She learned from me and I learned so long ago I can’t remember when I learned. I said this to a friend of mine who then issued a challenge: next time I was having fried rice try using my non-dominant hand. It’s a good exercise and a good allegory.

Doing anything left-handed if you are a right-handed person, forces you to not rely on reflex, memory, or habit. You have to think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You have to pay attention to the choices and decisions you’re making. You end up, not only with a lap full of food, but with a new or improved perspective of something that was so automatic you had stopped thinking about it.

Too often, life is about getting to that level of comfort that allows us not to think. We get there and suppose we’ve arrived. We equate mastering one set of skills done one way with mastery of all. We get into ruts, routines, quagmires of boredom, both mental and physical. Let those ruts get deep enough and we can start missing what’s around us. Breaking away, taking a second look, following a different path keeps the view fresh and the mind sharp.

Here are a couple of examples:

I live in the suburbs and usually commute to my job in downtown Los Angeles on the train. From the sidewalk, downtown LA is like a small town. The buildings don’t require street addresses, they are known as Library Tower or Wells Fargo or Arco Plaza, and they can all be recognized but their sculptures or entrance ways. At sidewalk level everything is cozy and small, but every so often I have to drive into work and the whole landscape changes. Two-way sidewalks turn into one-way streets, and suddenly everything looks so big, one huge wall of concrete and glass adjacent to another. Looking out the windshield my little village becomes unrecognizable. I have to look for street signs instead of landmarks because a newsstand or a fountain disappears at 30 mph. It’s a reminder that where I work really is the second largest city in the country.

I’m a life-long liberal. I’ve always thought of liberals as the good guys. Or I did. One day, while surfing through the usual assortment of What Hath George Wrought, I see an article on one of the left-wing blogs about Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The author claims she is aghast that Romney is not putting for position papers on the hearing of Warren Jeffs of the Fundamental Latter Day Saints, a very small, fringe religious group that was alleged to be engaging in forced arranged multiple marriages between older men and underaged girls. The hearing was to determine if there was enough evidence to charge Jeffs. She wasn’t asking Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton to jump in with opinions about something that hadn’t gone to trial, hadn’t resulted in a conviction, but Romney, she insisted, needed to take a stand. Why? Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget how the left railed against people who thought John Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith would affect his ability to fairly govern the country. Forget how the left has fought to keep religion out of politics and out of government. Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget even that it has been more than 100 years since the Latter Day Saints Church renounced polygamy and that the Latter Day Saints Church as nothing, zip, zero, zilch, nada to do with Jeffs and his group, because Romney is a Mormon. I read her tirade and it was my turn to be aghast. I don’t want Romney to be President for a lot of reasons, but being Mormon is not one of them, anymore than Obama’s race or Clinton’s gender are reasons they should not be president. Liberals don’t generate this kind of guilt by implied association. And yet, there it was, in pixel and bits on the computer screen, a liberal behaving badly. Worse than badly: unconscionably. Being Left is not the same as being right. Lesson learned.

Maybe I’d starve if I tried to eat every day with chopsticks left-handed, but looking at what we know we believe, what we believe we think, and what we think we know, can nurture us in ways we never imagined.