Hosting Each Moment
How running a Zoom meeting and cooking a chicken can change everything
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Point of View
I have a vague memory from high school physics about how atoms or subatomic particles are actually changed by how they are observed.
It’s like hosting a Zoom meeting for 40 people or cooking chicken for a friend.
Please stay with me as I wrangle this thought into a comprehensible post.
I attend a regular meeting for support and inspiration. Sometimes I serve as Virtual Meeting Host, aka VMH. That means I start the meeting and put up three slides, following a script which the meeting chair uses.
As I near the end of this week’s tour of duty, I realize that every single meeting this week has been fabulous. My fellow participants look beautiful in their squares. Each speaker is wise, honest, and daring. I have cards full of notes capturing pearls.
It’s the same meeting, with the same people when I am not the VMH.
What’s changed this week is the more focused, responsible attention I bring. I wait for the precise moment to put the first slide up, then transition to the next ones smoothly, following the script.
I don’t check email or sneak peeks at X. My more careful observation actually changes the meeting, or at least my experience of it.
Why is this like cooking chicken?
In my post-France commitment to cooking two meals a week, last night was Meal Number 2. I prepared it for Darlene and our friend Duce, who is visiting from Rhode Island.
It was a simple meal—no amuse bouche to start. I cut the into small pieces, mixed a sauce and cooked it in the Instant Pot. Darlene made the broccoli, rice, and corn on the cob.
After we had finished eating here at the dining room table, part of me was ready to leap up and do the dishes or start a fire in the fireplace. Anything but sit there and chat.
Because I’d been the chef host of the meal, it was easier for me to pay attention to Duce and Darlene and what they had to say as we visited at the table.
They were both more fascinating than usual.
My chef-level attention changed the evening.
As I recorded my first take on this thought out on the beach, I imagined I was hosting the scene.
Here comes our neighbor Lynn with her dog, walking in the early sun’s bright glow. There shines the calm ocean. Everything looked marvelous. (Photo above.)
Maybe I should have paid more attention to that high school physics class!