Now I know that all sorts of methods have been proposed to make the job easier. It may be that some of these methods even work. But I'm not here today to recommend a chickpea-skinning efficiency hack. I'm here to recommend the opposite.
I'm bringing up the skinning of chickpeas as an illustration of a whole class of labor that we pretty much wholly reject these days. Arduous, we call it. Boring. Mind-numbing. Manual. These adjectives are like the bright dashed lines that utility workers paint onto the lawn-grass. They indicate there's something deeper underground: in this case a copious pipeline of disdain. Need to weed the lawn of dandelions? Don't root them out with a dandelion digging tool; just spray and kill with herbicide! Dishes need washing? Put them in the dishwasher with some soap powder, flick a switch. Want to copy a poem? Call it up on a website and print the darned thing out. Then, with the time you've just saved, go do something more meaningful.
But what if this is just flat out wrong? Or mostly wrong? Or even just partly wrong? What if food is better, precisely because our own hands were involved in its making? What if poems are more enjoyable precisely because we copy them out by hand with a pen or with the percussive strike of typewriter keys? What if the reason we equate physical labor with meaninglessness is that we keep stubbornly neglecting to add something essential to the labor itself? Such as singing? Such as children playing in background? Such as the swapping of stories? Such as listening to the birds? Such as the simple striving to feel a Zen affection for the present moment?
Especially conversation makes work go sweetly by. There is no human gift so beautiful and everyday as the gift of conversation. And yet we discount it. Avoid it. Replace it with machines. I think we should do more conversing. And I think that, to encourage us to do more of it, we ought to do boring chores, more of them, just in general more.
As you may have guessed, not long ago Sunnyside was witness to the skinning of a certain population of chickpeas. I do not remember all the particulars of that episode of labor: exactly how long it took, or even what time of day it was when I myself took part in the work of de-skinning. I think it was late morning. But I do remember this. I was with my wife. And we sat across the dining room table from one another, and, as we did the work with our hands, that is, as we picked up peas from one metal bowl, skinned them, and deposited them nude and glistening into a different bowl, bing, we talked. And now the jar of tasty hummus that sits in our refrigerator, is also a sign of meaning exchanged, stories transferred. It is part of the cement of relationship, a gift to ourselves that she and I made together.
I really am saying we ought to do more chores, if we possibly can, and especially if we can do them together, and especially if the chores in question give us space to talk with one another: maybe in silence, because even certain kinds of silence can be forms of conversation, but probably more often with actual nouns and verbs strung together aloud to communicate love and to create a common story.
As Eve says to Adam in Paradise Lost:
With thee conversing I forget all time,/All seasons and their change, all please alike...Time to talk. Time to weed the garden. Skin the peas. Try it. Really. Maybe instead of boredom you'll feel something more like the return of time itself, which is to say, the return of light and creamy nutritious life.
HB
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