The other day I was coming down the hall of my apartment building, and my little neighbor Anna, was out there, spinning herself in a circle. (she’s 6, not crazy)I watched her for a second, as she then stopped spinning and stumbled woozily around like a tiny drunk and fell to the floor in a heap, and asked her if she was spinning to make herself so dizzy that she’d fall down, and she grinned her little gap-toothed smile and nodded her curly head.
I told her that I loved to do that too, when I was little, and she smiled again and said, “can I see your apartment?” which is what she and her sister always want to do, they love to look into other apartments on the floor. (I do too) But I said no, not this time, and went inside and left her to her spinning.
Little Anna had that unique un-selfconsciousness that small kids have, before bigger kids and teachers and parents and the world bash it out of you. She didn’t care what she looked like as she spun and tumbled into a lump on the carpet, she just knew it was a fun, crazy thing to do with her body. I totally remember that feeling. Before you were even AWARE of your body, in a sense, and you just lived in it, comfortably. Before you were forced to think about it, before the pediatrician told you that you were getting too fat, before your older sister made you feel self-conscious, before it all got ruined by external forces that created doubt and self-loathing in you. Before all that.
She just wanted to spin, to change the feeling of standing upright, of seeing straight, to alter her reality for a minute. I wonder if kids who love to do that, tend to grow up to abuse more substances? Do they get hooked on distorting their reality? Changing their experience of the world? Reshape it for a few minutes? Make the hallway walls seem round and blurry, not straight and square? Or do they go to work for big food companies and form chicken slurry paste into little dinosaurs and corn powder and sugar into pink princess cereal shapes? Are we all just overgrown toddlers, as I’ve said before, trying to recapture the delicious feeling of being dizzy and seeing the world in a blur? I can’t even get on a swing anymore without getting motion sickness, but I loved to make the world spin 40 years ago.
Maybe that’s why we love to play with the natural shape of things, mess around with nature, alter stuff. Because we can’t do it the same way we did as kids? I’ve been wondering about this lately. Why can’t we accept the shape of things? Our environments, our food, our bodies? All formed by nature, or by nature with our help, good or bad… In the case of Foodiness™, mostly bad. No, actually…all bad.