It Is All Filler Anyway
I was at class last week and used a saying I heard years ago from a friend of mine. Let me tell you the story. One day my friend brought in his lunch which his mother made. It sort of looked like stuffed peppers. My mother used to make those for me when I was a kid. I did not like the meal but you ate what you were given back then. Stuffed peppers have a mixture of hamburger, rice, tomato sauce and spices, stuffed inside a green pepper. My mother would work very hard to create her signature stuffed pepper. She added her own secret ingredients to make hers the best they could be.
When I looked at my friend’s stuffed peppers, I saw hamburger and rice stuffed into a green pepper with ketchup on top. It did not resemble my mother’s creation. It looked like it was just the raw ingredients. So I asked him what he was eating. He told me it was his mother’s version of stuffed peppers. He told me how she is not a good cook and he said as long as he didn’t have to cook it, he was grateful for his lunch. Then he looked at me and said, “It is all filler anyway.”
I started thinking about his statement and that the truth is all the separate ingredients in stuffed peppers are perfectly healthy and taste good. His stuffed pepper, special or not, still provided the same fuel after digesting it that any other stuffed pepper would give. My friend was right. It is all filler.
Our lives are the same. When you live in the present moment you can see how our egos add stuff in the form of stories to our present moment to make our lives interesting to ourselves and to the people that we tell our stories to. How much time and energy do we spend creating our own secret ingredient so that we have an interesting story to tell ourselves or make our lives feel worth living? How much work are you putting into your dressed-up present moment? Everyone lives in the present moment. The question is, how much filler do you add to your present moment?
My friend’s stuffed peppers were as bare bones as stuffed peppers go. But they had all the ingredients of a stuffed pepper just without the signature look or taste. It was just a plain stuffed pepper, no story, no special sauce. It was fuel for his hungry body. It just was!
I Healed my Crohn's Colitis 