When you’re relaxed, in neutral and simply being mindful to the present moment, you will, after some time, find that you start to love things – not ‘things’ in terms of the things you can buy in stores or online, nor things in terms of the things that you normally ‘love’, such as people and your parents and kids, but just things. Everything. No discrimination here. Once you’re neutral around stuff, you seem to start loving the stuff (that’s magic in itself), even the dodgy stuff – though that’s clearly more difficult. But look at the times when you faced very difficult things, very difficult times. Now, this doesn’t always happen, but it often does: when you emerge out of the other end of a difficult patch, you see what it has given you; you see that where you are now wouldn’t have been possible without experiencing it; you see that, in a peculiar way, it was ‘perfect.’ Not always but often. You might put other words and explanations to it: you may conclude that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ it’s ‘part of God’s plan,’ that ‘everything is perfect.’ But it’s just enough to see once we’re in the better position of having come through something very difficult, that it had its purpose.
To Love It is to feel that, but in the present, not just in retrospect. ‘Retrospect’ is a lovely word, isn’t it? To Love It is to Love It when you introspect (look at yourself), extrospect (look around you) when you nowaspect (look in the now). I like making up words very much. I vow to write my next book only in made-up words. But words made up of other words that you vaguely recognize. Though I’ve just realized at least one genius got there first: ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe’1 (Google that, it’ll be fun). Scrub that, I hereby vow to write my next book only in words that are not made up, and have been used before. I will focus instead in putting those unoriginal words together in a new and original order. People will be astonished by the heights of originality I scale in the way I put those entirely unoriginal words together.
I Love It a lot. I love reality just as it is, as it unfolds before me. And that feeling of Loving It is heightened when I’m relaxed: when I’ve said F**k It to the things that are bugging me, stressing me, upsetting me. Not that I don’t love being bugged, stressed, and upset. It’s just hard. I say F**k It. I Relax It. I Love It. Then when the bugging, stressing, and upsetting return, I’m more likely to be Loving It.
Incidentally, speaking of things that bug me, is it just me, or does McDonald’s tagline of ‘I’m lovin’ it’ really bug you, too? You do have to wonder when a major corporation tries to put words in the mouths of the public. I suppose they can’t legally force-feed us with their food, so they try the next best thing: force-feeding us with our response to their food.
I can’t help but hear it being uttered through gritted teeth. Like a suit from McDonald’s head office is holding a cattle stunner against your head, while another suit feeds you another Big Mac and asks, ‘So how is it, Joooohhhhnnnn?’ (They’d say ‘John’ like that, believe me.) And my eyes would dart toward the other suit with the cattle stunner pressing against my temple. And he would wink at me, and I’d say, through gritted teeth, ‘I’m lovin’ it.’
I hate the way they now put nutritional information everywhere on the basis that people probably won’t really read the details – they’ll just assume that if McDonald’s can display the nutritional contents so prominently, then their food can’t be THAT unhealthy.
I hate the way McDonald’s lorries, in the UK at least, look like Ben & Jerry’s ads these days. Suddenly McDonald’s is sourcing everything from local farms, and loving the cows who are fed on lovingly watered grass, before they ask them how life is. ‘Mooooo,’ say the cows, ‘We’re lovin’ it,’ before they get hit with the stun gun anyway.
It’s not just the cows that are being sacrificed for McDonald’s bottom line. It’s our judgment, too. We’re zombies, walking slowly to the front of the line to order our meal deals:
‘Please tell me stuff that makes me feel okay, in these health-conscious, locally sourced, environment-aware times, so I can eat the same old shit that I’ve been addicted to for years… I know it’s basically the same nutritionally poor, but rich-in-fat-and-sugar concoction that it was when I was a kid, but I like it, and I just pray that you can make up any old nonsense to salve my conscience, okay?’
I’d prefer it if they were just straight with us: ‘Sure we know most of this stuff is no good for you. But don’t we make it tasty, eh? Especially after you’ve had a couple of beers or a shake that bursts your eardrums as you try to suck it up the straw. And have you seen the prices? You can’t buy a salad leaf in a posh deli for the price of one of our hamburgers. Go on, treat yourself. You can have a salad tomorrow.’
In fact, I reckon just that line would transform McDonald’s fortunes:
McDonald’s. Salad’s for tomorrow.
That’s why I’m more likely to go into a ‘Heart Attack Café’ than a McDonald’s. At least I know what I’m dealing with.
‘I’m lovin’ it.’ I am, actually. I love seeing how things are. I love looking into the window of McDonald’s and wondering. I don’t go in. But I wonder. Then I wander some more. I love wandering and I love wondering. I love city places, and everything in the city places. I love the things people do in city places. And I love country places, and everything in the country places. I love the things animals and people do in country places. Places, people, animals, buildings, trees, generosity, and selfishness. It’s all life.
And I, for one, Love It.
1 From ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll (in case you’re not Wi-Fi-ed up at the moment or can’t be bothered to look it up).