Put your left foot over your right ear

Just to make myself clear before I start, no, I hadn't taken any strange cold medication nor had I eaten something weird the night before this happened. It was as simple as this; I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought, Gee, anyone who eats salad must be quite flexible. And by flexible I don't mean Nadia Comaneci flexible, I mean psychologically and emotionally flexible.

Look, I don't pretend to be a profound dreamer like the Biblical Joseph. But who could possibly ignore such a propetic message? Ok, so most people can...but I couldn't. Over and over again in the middle of the night I promised myself I would remember my salad thought when I woke up. I was sure there was something my brain was trying to tell me, other than I needed to buy lettuce and possibly to go get a life.

Luckily for me, this message came to me on a Saturday night, so I had all of Sunday to think about this while avoiding everything of substance that I needed to do. This seemingly cryptic clue became crystal clear when I thought about my students.

If you've ever watched children eat, as I have my own at home, or in my classroom or in the lunchroom at school, you might observe that generally, children have a uniform way of eating. They'll eat all of one food, then move to the next, and then to the next, until they have finished everything (or thrown it out, but those are stories for another posting). There's rarely any variation of a theme; no, let's try a little bit of this, and then a little bit of that, and then back to some more of this (Seinfeld fans, I purposely avoided using the words, this, that and...the other).

A salad, as we all know, is made up of a variety of different ingredients. Every forkful of salad brings a unique combination of flavours to the tongue. A person is never guaranteed that he or she will get the same taste sensation twice (sorry Gump fans), hence my late night thought that anyone who eats salad must be someone who can deal with a lot of different things being thrown at them at once, thereby making them flexible.

But here's my question: are salad eaters missing something by eating their ingredients all mixed together, by being so flexible? What can we learn by children's eating habits? And yes, I'm going somewhere with this.

Let's think about this. The mixture of foods in a salad, although a tasty treat, doesn't give the taster the enjoyment of tasting individual flavours, because so many tastes are bombarding the mouth at the same time. When children eat one food at a time, they learn each food's distinct flavour and characteristics. They learn how a food feels on the tongue, if it's chewy or crunchy, sweet or salty. They learn the individuality of food. They appreciate each for its own merit and begin to learn to discern which flavours they like or dislike. That way, they'll know which tastes to avoid and which specific ones to savour.

To me, the average day is like a salad. A million things happen, but something always sticks out to claim that one adjective that will describe the entire day. Think about how, when you're tired after a day at work or working around the house, and someone asks you how your day was, you're able to reply with one word. It was 'great'. It was 'lousy'. It was 'frustrating'. It was...'okay'. How is it that we're able to take an entire day and condense it into one word...in essence, one memory? When we dig in and pull out one forkful to remember and discuss, how often do we choose a positive one, one that 'tastes good'? And why can one piece of soggy lettuce have the power to deem the entire salad to be terrible?

Let's be honest. Isn't finding that nasty, gritty piece of lettuce and talking about it a lot more interesting than relating a story about a great salad? 'I had a great salad' is a five word story, and a yawner at that. The story about how a delicious salad turned horrible is far more interesting, garners more attention and has a lot more staying power in a conversation. It can be reused and recycled at any time, especially after someone else tells a story about their bad experience with salad. 'I had a great salad' just sits  there like a limp leaf of lettuce.

I admit that when it comes to relating stories about my day, I have to fight the urge to tell the one that will get me the most bang for my buck... and more often than not, it's a story with a less than positive message or outcome. In my salad of life, I know that there are many forkfulls (and bowlfulls) that are downright vile. Maybe we can all learn from the children; savour the individual, delicious ingredients of each day, so that when our salad is tossed with things that are not so good, we can rely on the tasty forkfulls to get us through the day.