Sometimes, in the search for quick fixes for our compulsive eating, we end up finding paths that eventually control our symptoms but do not deal with the causes. We realize that we just exchanged a compulsion by another, like shopping, compulsively working, drinking, drugs, cutting, promiscuous sex.
We live in a society that imposes upon us a compulsive lifestyle that sells the idea that doing the right thing, the right way, will allow us to have it all and now. Many young people today identify success as winning his first million dollars before being thirty years old! Hunger for success, for money, for speed, excitement, novelty, pleasure. We even tend to turn up what could be an antidote to our pathological Compulsion, such as Mindfulness, sustainability, the “slow” movement into something reduced to a set of techniques to be quickly swallowed.
My friend Silvia Degani says we look like the rabbit from Alice, always running distressed because “it’s late”. She points up that what we really need is something like “knitting on the sidewalk” which in Portuguese also means real relationships, conversation with time, children drawing in the dust from corners…
The image inviting us to think about patterns, mechanisms, gears, is from Brazilian artist Abrão Palatnik, Kinectic object K66, Google image.