Coming to Grips with Diversity

A conversation that I often have with my female friends who like to cook is that they have just the right recipe' for whatever ingredient comes up in our chat, usually because I accidentally lead in from another subject.

Today I was talking to a devoted cook about having too much stuff in the fridge and I am a monoculture eater like my cats.  We don't go in for changing the menu too often.  There are many reasons for that but I think one is simply born in.  I have always been a fan of a very few kinds of food, not for the taste but for the ease of preparation, the convenience, so for instance, I have a tomato soup by brand, Annies, of which I am very fond.  I also enjoy butternut squash soup, but many times I have bought squash, and or diced and prepared squash, and a variety of recipe's and mixes, and I end up throwing the squash out for the raccoons and squirrels.  I don't even want to get a pot out and put stuff into it.

Two of my closes friends are talented and devoted to cooking and they cannot comprehend why I don't share their passion.  I can try many avenues both experiential and psychological, but my mind is not suited to the time intervals of cooking and I cannot stand to wait for water to boil or onions to caramelize.  My concentration span is more suited to reading several chapters of a difficult book, or painting a landscape, or drawing, or writing a story.  I can concentrate on printed materials for many hours, but I have a real problem with 5 to 10 minutes.  I have burned to cinders a good many pots and what were supposed to be hard boiled eggs.  I drift off.

Always, to my mind, comes the analogy of birds liking to roost in trees and fish liking to swim in streams.  We are all a kind of energy entity in some form at this time and we are all suited by inclination as well as by talent for some specific endeavor - specific to US individually.  

When I was a college teacher, I used to ask my students to imagine we are going to have an IQ test.  The art students groaned.  I would say, "The engineers would be grinning and confident.  They I pass out the paper and pencils and tell them the test to draw, anatomically accurately, and artisticly, the human hand.  Some would do renderings of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting, so would illustrate a memory of a mother's hand performing a task.  The engineers would be stuck tracing the outlines of their hands.  But Artistic vision and creativity don't get much respect in our technological age.  Avetising and graphic design are our new 'factories.'

Still, some would argue that artist's have no choice, we must create, and others that the joy and satisfaction of creating art whether music, computer, dance, theater, or visual art, is a reward in itself.
It is.  But the dark side of that fact is that many of us are 'different' and we know it from an early age.  We don't fit in, whether from our natural proclivities, to draw and paint, to read and write, to dance and sing, or from the different ways we see the world, which is part of being creative.  We don't fit in and are often viewed with suspicion and also often, mocked, as in all the digs directed toward what detractor like to call 'egg heads.'  After egg heads came nerds the often solitary people who get so engrossed in what they are doing that half days and even whole days can go by without them being aware of the passage of time.

Maybe if we could even come to grips with people of differing abilities, we could get better at warmth and acceptance for people of different genders and gender identities, not to mention races and religions.

Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com