Last week, our friend cooked some food and let us tasted them. We chat while we were eating, we talked about our senses. And a topic rose, “Sometimes, we actually eat with our eyes, ears and nose”. Can you believe it?

Why we said that we use our eyes to eat? It is because sometimes we can get bloated by just looking at the “ugly” food. We won’t feel that we want to eat the food because of its colour, shape or its outlook. Our minds have been fed with the food through our eyes and we chose not to continue. In the opposite way, a food in good shape can attract people to try them, it can be said that our eye has tasted the food before our mouths and tongues taste them.

We will not eat the food if we heard a negative comment on a certain food. For example, if we hear others said that the food is disgusting, or the food can cause you sickness or the food is prepared in an unhygienic way etc. The food have been eaten by our ears before they can reach our mouths.

For me, if I smell strange smell, I will give up the food immediately. I have a sensitive nose. Years ago, when I was a kid, my parents used a box that was previously used to store soap to store the rice. I can smell the soap in the rice and I am the only one who complaint. My parents, brothers and sisters did not sense it and did not believe it until a week later after the smell got stronger. I ate only a small portion every day because the smell made me dizzy and wanted to vomit. Luckily, they believed what I said at last.

It is a need for our eyes, ears and noses to try the food first before we actually put them in our mouth. Otherwise many unnecessary things will happen such as food poisoning. Some people would not even care about what they put into their own mouth. It would be dangerous. So do not be stingy to let our senses taste the food before we eat them. Another word, we should think carefully before we eat anything, as what a famous proverb in Chinese that sounds like this, “Sickness reaches us by our mouth, and troubles come out from our mouth.” (in Mandarin: Bing4Chong2Kou3Ru4, Huo4Chong2Kou3Chu1).

There was water in the drain, but I had used my body to create a shadow to block the light from the sky to reflect on the water surface. I told myself, if I can use a polarizing (PL) filter, I do not have to do this. I took this picture vertically looking down into the drain which again the camera almost touched the water in the drain. The stones were actually in the water, did you notice it? Can you prove it from the picture?

Again, these stone were extremely small; some are less than 1 mm. You have to imagine that the actual sizes of the stones are smaller than what you now see on the monitor. This is the effect of the macro mode in my camera.

Some of the stones are orange in colour, but some are green (which actually was the moss grown on the stones). Some are big, some are small. They are arranged in random ways and having random sizes and shapes creating different patterns.

Most of the time, we ignore small stuffs around us. Should we do that?

I remember a story, once upon a time there was a higher officer (in older days, he was called “Da4Guan1” in China) visited his subordinate’s home. The higher officer found that his subordinate’s home was in a mess, dirty and has never been cleaned. He asked what the reason was; his subordinate said that he was always too busy to clean his house. The higher officer immediately admonished him to change his attitude. The higher officer said, “If you cannot even manage your own home, how are you going to manage the whole village?”

You may say that we should not waste time on non important small stuffs. But if I did not notice small things in the nature, I won’t appreciate the great Mother Nature that allow me to take so much photos. From here I have learned to appreciate what the Mother Nature has given us.

Sometimes, delegation is a good idea instead of ignoring something.

Most of the time, we do not notice even that we are breathing and having heartbeats, because we delegate it to our lung and heart. But when we have time and sit quietly and try to notice them, it is a good time to discover more about our own body and mind.