a life without ice cream

it’s hard to imagine a life without ice cream. I don’t mean a life without ice cream every day, I don’t mean a life without ice cream occasionally—I mean, it’s hard to imagine a life where you’re never tasted ice cream, not once.

I should add the proviso but I mean it’s hard to imagine a person like you. Of course it’s quite easy to imagine a tribal person, perhaps in the Amazonian Basin, who has never come into contact with western civilisation sufficiently to encounter the product. But to imagine a person in the west who has never once been offered and accepted this common delicacy is almost unimaginable.

yet this product is totally supererogatory to life’s needs. In terms of fat and carbohydrate delivery it is both unbalanced and unhealthy. Aside from nutrition, chilling the stomach is probably not a very bright idea physiologically.

the multiplicity of ingredients and almost certainly non local manufacture can be added to this list of undesirable qualities.

yet imagine a childhood in the west without once the simple and wide eyed delight an ice cream on a hot day he can provide. It’s hard, isn’t it?

as I ate some ice cream that emerged from our conveniently located freezer, I reflected upon this. How easy it is to take whipped up pleasures of fantastic complexity utterly for granted. How hard to imagine even the simple renunciation of giving up the sweets and the sugary foods that dissolve our teeth and often result in extended agonies of dental pain.

even when an anāgārika and receiving all food items for one main meal into a single bowl, I sometimes was offered ice cream—whether or not it was dumped in with all the other food items, melting into the curry, it was still a supremely delicious food. Hardly renunciant fare.

the point of this rather overextended examination, is to wonder if we are not so far over the line into sensual pleasures that treading the Ariya Aṭṭhaangika Magga requires a massive shift to what would seem like asceticism. Too many pleasures are taken far too granted in the west, we are spoilt children liable to scream and kick when the smallest of our toys and pleasures is taken from us.

whether we adopt some upāsaka dhutanga, or try to practice some simple form of non discrimination in our everyday lives, we must surely recognise that the culture of plenty which surrounds us—the culture that we all deserve so much more—is a huge burden on the mind of someone who attempts to practice any kind of simplicity of living. A necessary factor if one is to have any chance of the slightest penetration into that most simple and deceptive of truths: the ever present fact of pain in our own lives, the unsatisfactoryness at the heart of all forms of existence.

a spoonful of ice cream is not dukkha, but attachment to it, and attachment to the sensation resultant, inevitably leads to dukkha. How easy it is to overlook the simple fact of these subtle mental processes, the habitual actions of mind that result from exposure to pleasant sensation.