A Fork in the Road

I realise that what I eat for breakfast is a trivial issue in view of all the challenges the world has faced in recent times. But if you read to the end of this piece, I hope you’ll see it’s about much more than what a relatively privileged guy like me chooses to order for breakfast. Thanks so much for reading, and I’d welcome any thoughts or feedback.

There are big decisions, and there are small decisions.

But if I create my own world, and contribute to the creation of our collective worlds, then the small decisions are important too — just as important, even, as the big decisions of where to live and who to love and what to do with one’s limited time on this precious earth.

Scrambled eggs on toast, or smashed avocado?

It seems a simple enough decision — what to have for breakfast?

And yet, sitting here at this cafe on a windy Saturday in Sydney, I can’t make up my mind!

What do I want? What should I get? What do I feel like, really?

Scrambled eggs is the safer option, obviously. I mean, I know what I’m getting, and I know it’ll taste good. And I like it when it’s cooked with a bit of cream, so it comes out all soft and fluffy.

I think it represents comfort, really.

Comfort … security … familiarity … and the truth that, though so many things change in life — friendships begin and end, jobs come and go, homes are built and farewelled, governments change, revolutions are made, and the centuries parade along in fanfare — there are some things that are reliable and beautiful in their simplicity, and scrambled eggs is one of them.

It’s like putting on an old pair of Uggs.

Or eating popcorn at the movies with friends.

Or coming home to a big hug after a long trip away.

And you know what, with everything that’s been going on lately, I could do with a bit of predictability — just a couple of eggs, scrambled, on toast, to calm my worried mind.

Then again, when I saw a psychologist a few years ago, she told me to do what scares me.

I was terrified of dancing at the time, so I signed up for a swing dancing class the next week.

Why swing dancing? No idea, really — I was just drawn to it.

I went along to the first class on a Tuesday night with anxiety in my heart and fear in my soul. And then I realised after about half an hour there was nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all!

No one was judging me.

I wasn’t as clumsy as I thought.

And, beautifully, the music was enlivening and sentimental and made me think of old black-and-white photographs of my great-grandparents standing awkwardly outside their small rural home in some far-flung town of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And yes, I know swing dancing began in America in the 1920s.

But that’s the way the mind works sometimes — and it’s nice to let it wander.

Suddenly, it starts to rain.

A man pulls out a bright orange jacket from the back of his motorbike.

A woman walking two dogs — I think they might be dachshunds — hurries by.

A young guy — probably a university student — is reading his kindle on a street bench and decides to take cover under an old fig tree.

“I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more,” wrote the Australian demographer Bernard Salt in 2016.

“Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.”

I recently found the full article, which Mr Salt says was intended not to criticise young people’s spending habits but rather to poke fun at ageing baby boomers who offer opinions like this.

Either way, the article was an ignition switch for societal concerns around housing affordability and intergenerational equity.

At the end of last year, the median price of a house in Sydney was a little over $1.6 million — or 72,727 servings of smashed avocado, at $22 a pop.

Thankfully, the smashed avo at this cafe is a much more reasonable $16.80 (with the scrambled eggs coming in at an even $12).

And after the constant quarantining and repeated Zooming that the pandemic has brought to everyday life, the menu description gives me a feeling of vitality and imagination.

Smashed avocado with cherry tomatoes, feta cheese, Kalamata olives, Za’atar herbs and fresh lemon served on sourdough …

It makes me feel youthful.

Energetic.

Cool.

It puts me firmly in the inner city — amidst colourful street art, leafy indoor plants and converted warehouses.

And it takes me to the coast and across the seas, too — to fresh air and summer, to the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Above all, it makes me feel that things are moving forward, the world is changing for the better, there’s nourishment and diversity amidst the stultifying fear of our mechanical lives.

Life is a miraculous journey after all, and we need to let go of the brakes sometimes.

Can you feel all the energy inside you? So much potential, just waiting to be set free.

I had a realisation once that everything we do, everything we say, everything we buy and throw away — the full expression that we convey to the world — has an impact.

All of it matters.

Even if we’re not conscious of it, it affects the environment that other people inhabit, and that affects their behaviour, and that affects the nature of our society, and if you extrapolate that out billions and billions of times, it determines, or at least greatly influences, the state of the world.

And looking at the world right now, it could certainly be in better shape!

I know it’s not a big contribution, but I have been trying to eat a little less meat lately.

My main motivation is moral — I think killing generally isn’t a kind thing to do, to put it mildly, and I can’t see any logical reason why I shouldn’t try to be kind to all sentient beings.

There are good health and environmental reasons, too.

I can’t be too high-minded about it, though — I cooked salmon with mashed potato for dinner last week, and I may well order a beef stir-fry or chicken schnitzel next time I’m out.

I do make a point of buying free-range eggs when I go to the supermarket, though.

Then again, one of my friends reckons the labels are misleading. So who knows if the chickens are really freer than their caged friends?

I can tell you this, though: my mind doesn’t feel very free right now. I mean, do I even have the freedom to choose what to eat for breakfast?

Of course, it seems like I do. But do I really?

Or has the decision already been made for me, by virtue of the trillions and trillions of inputs that have come into my brain over the course of my life — words and images, feelings and thoughts, that determine what I will do, even without me knowing, at every second of every day.

“You’ve already made the choice. You just have to understand and allow it,” as The Oracle says in The Matrix.

Ah Jason, but to transcend the self and its wants and needs.

Who am I anyway, really?

Just a collection of memories …

… a physical body that will wear with time …

… the product of my relationships with others, seemingly lasting connections that will inevitably pass, as all things do.

The problem, then, my friend, is the self.

The cause of so much suffering.

The cause of all our pain.

The self that’s created by the voice in my head, a voice that defines my identity and my relationship to the world, a voice wondering aloud now whether I’m best served by smashed avocado or scrambled eggs, and whether I will grow and evolve in the way that best serves humanity by this one small move.

Have you seen the movie Sliding Doors?

Or read Robert Frost’s poem?

So much can hinge on one decision, on one moment — this moment.

True, it’s never happened before that what I ordered for breakfast influenced the trajectory of my life. But who’s to say this time won’t be different?

There’s so much to weigh up, then.

Cost.

Calories.

Bernard Salt.

Who I want to be in the world, and what contribution I can make to our collective life.

“What is life, but tangents; and what is indecision, but the appreciation of multiple things,” a friend once wrote to me.

Can I have my cake and eat it too, then? Is there a way to enjoy that comforting sense of stability while also being creative and daring and open to the world?

A tree is bending in the wind.

The waves are rolling into shore.

Two birds flutter in the sky — making circles, diving and rising again, gliding on the breeze, together, then apart, apart, then together again, a pattern, a dance, a routine, a piece of art.

The waiter comes over.

“What can I get you, sir?”

“I’ll have the corn fritters,” I say.

“And anything to drink?” he replies.