Eating a little bitter each day…
Every day, engage in something that challenges or contradicts you.
A touch of constraint. Dive into details when you tend to see the bigger picture; focus on numbers when you gravitate towards the human aspect. Imposing discipline liberates and prevents personal imbalance and stagnation, even lack of self-realization over time. Without this, things remain unanchored and adrift.
Eating every day a little bitter
Bitterness, a taste we've lost, like sourness.
What have we lost with bitterness? We are the children of Sweetness, fed abundantly to women in harems to keep them subdued. Sugar soothes and inhibits. Bitter and sour awaken. The 17th century divided sweet from savory, gradually imposing an order on what we consume.
The children of sweetness, like those in the witch’s gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, to be better consumed.
Sugar is added to our food, in apples, hamburgers... Sugar sedates and numbs, and has been used for that purpose. It lulls and distorts reality. Yet, without the constraints that reality imposes, we become enslaved. Because overcoming constraints fosters growth.
The quest for immediate pleasure from consumption traps us in the fleeting and unstable. It generates a perpetually renewed frustration—since 'to consume' is to constantly desire more, different, better, something else, who knows? A kind of "revolving" pleasure, endless binging, a cave without the shadows passing overhead. When the thirst for possession kills the thirst for being. It breeds a tendency to procrastinate, to put off until tomorrow, after all, what’s the difference? "Yes, I’ll do it… tomorrow." But that tomorrow is never today.
Eating every day a little bitter
This balance, provided by “eating a bit of bitter every day,” relates to the traditional medicinal approach of preventive healing, to keep the patient from falling ill. Moreover, should we still call them “patients” in this context?
Each day, do something that opposes your usual inclinations. Then you will understand the measure of all things.
Excerpt from the old blog The Chnese World and Me by MEB
Hansel et Gretel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansel_and_Gretel
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