In the 1950s housewives who cared about cooking - the foodies of the day - used canned food. Women across America delighted in being au courant, in step with the newest trends in culinary arts. My mother-in-law never relinquished her love of canned mushroom soup as a topping for basically anything.
Not so my mother. Instead of hitting the canned goods aisle, she enrolled in French cooking classes with Dione Lucas, Julia Child’s teacher. Eschewing canned or frozen vegetables, she cooked only fresh… in a pressure cooker.
Pressure cookers have been in the news a lot recently since at least one of the bombs detonated at the Boston Marathon was housed in one. They provide a rich, tangential metaphor for so much that has been happening recently.
To greater or lesser degrees we all tote pressure cookers around in our backpacks. Locked tightly away, small resentments, hurts and frustrations stew in the dark. But pretty soon unexpressed petty annoyances gain steam and start releasing pressure in sometimes unproductive ways.
This tendency to seal our emotions up tight and not communicate with one another before small annoyances explode is dangerous - dangerous not just because often-inappropriate bombs go off - but detrimental to us as well.
Recent research suggests that how we behave actually affects our neural pathways. So the less you communicate with other people face to face, the less you talk - not by computer or by texting - but in person, the less good at it you will be. Your brain, like other muscles, loses its tone; another example of use it or lose it. According to Barbara Fredrickson, “ Neurons that fire together, wire together.” This suggests that the less we interact with others, the more difficult it will become for us to do so; our brains simply won’t have the flex, the neuroplasticity needed.
One of the greatest threats that face us as we age is isolation. Retired and living alone, many people are simply lonely. Joan Chittister says “Aloneness is the new monastery of the elderly.” That they become less adept at personal interactions is a self-fulfilling prophecy; their brains actually suffer from a lack of elasticity, making it increasing difficult to communicate.
But the same phenomenon happens to those much younger, those who spend a large portion of their days staring at screens of one kind or another and not interacting directly with other people. Many of us fall into this category and we should be concerned.
I for one don’t ever want to lose the ability to look into someone’s eyes and get a sense of what he or she may be feeling. Or sense that I, in turn, am really seen.
The best way to insure our ability to interact with others is to do so directly, to open up the pressure cooker, release the steam and talk openly about the big and small things that fill our days before, in some misguided moment, we blow things out of proportion and inadvertently rain shrapnel on those we love.
