The Importance of Being Tuesday

As a soft Korean rain falls outside my window, I reflect on my day. You see, today is Tuesday. Normally, I suppose Tuesday doesn’t mean all that much. To be sure, Tuesday generally, simply, hangs around as one of those extra appendage days of the week. It certainly doesn’t have the reproachful aura of a Monday. It certainly isn’t somewhat positive like that Hump-Day Wednesday business. Thursday has a strange aura because it is so close to the weekend, and if you went to a college where there were classes on Monday/Wednesday/Friday and different classes on Tuesday/Thursday, you would probably even say that Thursday was the start of the weekend. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are too obvious to even touch, which leaves Tuesday in a really awkward place.
One regular day (“what kind of days are regular” is the obvious question to ask here) just over one month ago on a Monday, I was walking to work and pondering this exact question of what each day of the week “means.” What I came up with, in brief, is explained about, and I decided to do something about that Tuesday business.
I am by nature a very spiritual person. To be sure, my grandfather, my father, and at least one uncle are ordained ministers in Church—mainly Southern Baptist (or just Baptist). At any rate, you can probably imagine that I spent many, many days of my formative years in and around dealing with spirituality—although from a purely technical standpoint it is important to say here that what I was actually working through was Religion. At any rate, I have a lot of history with Spirit.
Recently, as a matter of fact, I finished reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and I highly recommend it to anyone with the slightest bit of interest in matters of religion and faith and spirituality. Just before Augustine, I finished Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and the world of spirituality was swimming around my head. Finally, as I am currently residing in Asia, I have been investigating the eastern traditions of spirituality, too—a focused reading of the Tao Teh Ching and a long study of a book called May All Beings Be Happy by a Seon Buddhist monk named Beop Jeong. With all of these various traditions of spirit running around my head, I decided to take Tuesday and see what happens, what kind of importance it gains, when we invest it with some spirituality. Being an at least fairly diligent ontologist, the question was: how?
That’s when it struck me that there is something that really combines everything. There is something out there that has history and roots in every major religion. There is something out there that goes beyond religion and touches on humanity itself. There is a spiritual experience out there that every individual experiences every day whether they realize it or not. Have you guessed what it is?
Food. Nourishment. Fasting.
I have long had a very intimate relationship with food. I was once asked what my three favorite foods were, and my response was:
1) Super fresh. As in, I just got these from my garden out back. I grew them, and now I’m going to eat them. This food is intensely good to me. I just had some shellfish at a beach in South Korea where they had basically just pulled everything out of the water that morning. It… was… incredible.
2) Handmade/homemade. It might take a little bit longer to make, and I can guarantee you it will, but I will always prefer something that has been loved for a few extra minutes to something instant. The last time I had Mexican food was in Korea and we couldn’t find any tortillas, so I made them from scratch (I haven’t had the opportunity to it in a while, but my skills were still there), and the mouth can taste love.
3) Anything with good people and good drinks. It is entirely possible to eat anything, including food that might taste horrible, but if you are with the right people and the right bottle of wine, the beauty and spirituality of the experience come out. The other night I had the opportunity to make dinner and share a bottle of wine with somebody I care about, and there is almost nothing else that I would rather eat than those moments spent together.
So, I already have a spiritual association with food. Add to this the fact that I am incredibly adventurous with food and you’ll see how deep the spirituality goes. “Oh, people eat this, huh? Well, gimme some, let’s see.”
The other day I was sitting with a friend of mine at the shellfish feast I mentioned earlier, and she said to me something like, “I really prefer to have food I know,” when it struck me that I would almost PREFER to have food that I have never eaten before. If you know you’ll like something, there is no adventure. If you don’t know, you can turn it into a spiritual adventure.
Finally, the reality of the human experience is such that without food or nourishment for a long period of time, we would die. Food is necessary. You could almost say that we are food. I am by no means advocating that old saying, “You are what you eat”—although there may be a nugget of truth in there—what I am saying is that we exist in the perpetual need for food. That need IS who we are.
And so, Tuesday’s are fasting days. It is too difficult to fast on the weekends. I am a fairly weak person when it comes to food, and I very often find myself out with some of my very favorite people every weekend enjoying number three mentioned above. I know myself at least well enough to know that attempting to fast on the weekend was right out. Monday already has enough going for it—or against it as… as you will. Wednesdays I go into town and play the guitar and get to be with my people. Thursday was up in the air. Friday… well, Friday might as well be the weekend, eh? Essentially, the deciding factor was eenie-meenie-minie-moe, catch a tiger by its toe, if it hollers make him pay, fifty dollars every day, my momma told me to pick the very best one and you are it. Tuesday it was.
I have been fasting every Tuesday for a month with absolutely no religious intent. I fully understand that this is perhaps nothing new, and it is certainly not new from a religious standpoint. However, I have already been able (even in the relatively short time of this experiment) to observe some interesting things. First, I always appreciate food much more on Wednesday than I did on Monday. To look down at the bowls of soup and rice before me at family meal on Wednesday MEANS more than it did on Monday, and I’m working on a way to make it mean the same thing both days. Second, I’m not really all that hungry on Wednesday morning. I’ve become very aware of the fact of the habit of eating, and how the body gets used to doing eating at certain times. In this place and at this time, I am not much of a breakfast guy, and my body has gotten used to only having a cup of coffee, so the need isn’t really there when I wake up. Third, it is simply a will power workout. When you realize that you CAN say no to food for an entire day, you realize that you can do other things. Your brain is shocked into the realization that there is nothing to stop it from making an entirely new decision in its way of being. At least… that’s how I experience it.