The Truffle Tragedy
What if “right now” is the perfect time to enjoy the sweetness of life?
“Elena” was deep-dive house-cleaning. As she rummaged through the back of a kitchen drawer, she found…a forgotten box of expensive artisanal truffles. Over a year old. Definitely stale, definitely not worth eating. But still gorgeous.
A happy client had given her these carefully-chosen treats as an expression of their gratitude. They may not have known that Elena didn’t eat in general and certainly didn’t eat sweets. Elena accepted the gift box and stowed it away, saving it for some Special Occasion.
And then she entirely forgot about it. Busy with work, busy with achieving, busy with striving. Her life had no room for truffles.
But then when she saw them, she felt a pang of remorse. If only she had remembered! If only that Special Occasion had come around! If only she had taken time to enjoy even one of those best-quality truffles. And now it was too late. She had wasted that particular chance.
“Alas, it’s a peculiar kind of distraction that could make one forget about chocolate truffles,” she said.
To me the true truffle tragedy was that it is not a peculiar kind of distraction. It’s the most common kind there is. Maybe not all of us, but definitely a lot of us, live truffle-starved lives, and we are the ones starving ourselves. We grieve, with just cause, over the unfairness, the suffering, and the hardship that life throws our way. But we also get stuck staring at the hard stuff. We get stuck struggling toward the illusion of a better tomorrow. And we get stuck striving for impossible ideals.
“I’ve spent my life waiting for the perfect moment. It’s only recently that I’ve realized that I’ve waited too long,” she said.
When life hands us truffles, we often stow them away in the back of a drawer and forget them. We wait for a time when we will feel like we deserve the truffles. And then life goes by and then it’s too late. And we can mourn, but we will never get back the chance at pleasure that we threw away.
What if we deserve the truffles right now? Or better yet, what if “deserve” is an irrelevant word? What if these are amoral truffles, meant to be celebrated just because we can? And what if the Special Occasion is the tasting of the truffles?
What if right now is the perfect time to enjoy whatever sweetness life hands us?
I shared a Mary Oliver poem with Elena. “Don’t Hesitate,” it’s called. “Joy is not made to be a crumb,” says Oliver. And yet here we so often are, doling it out meagre crumb by meagre crumb, or not at all. Perhaps it’s fear that stops us from revelling in the gushing waves of honey that joy prefers to arrive in. Perhaps it’s habit. Perhaps it’s something else. But whatever it is that’s stopping us, we do have the power to shift our relationship with joy. With pleasure.
With truffles.
Elena decided to ensure the truffle tragedy would not have happened in vain. She would honour their deaths by taking careful note when moments of pleasure offered themselves to her in the future. And instead of squirrelling them away for a time when she would feel more worthy, she would take part in them right then. In the present moment.
Because the perfect time for joy is right now.
Jordana del Feld is a psychotherapist accepting new California-based telehealth clients. Check out her website at jordanadelfeldtherapy.com
- Devotions, Mary Oliver, Penguin Random House, 2017.
