Two weeks ago I bought a Whirly Pop. Since that time I think I've used it every evening except for two for a late night snack. What is a Whirley Pop? I'm glad you asked. The Whirley Pop is a new way (for me) to cook popcorn. You place some vegetable oil and popcorn kernels in the pot that you see to the left and then heat it on your stove top, turning the handle slowly in order to sift the kernels around until they begin popping. After placing the popcorn in a bowl, you can season it any way you wish. The result is a popped corn that is crisp, light and delicious -- not like the popcorn that you pull out of the micorwave. My roomates and I have had fun joking around about my fascination/borderline obsession with the Whirley Pop. I mean, really, it tastes good and all but there's only so much you can do to a popcorn kernel; no matter what way you cook it, it still tastes like popcorn. Not only does it still taste like popcorn, but making popcorn with the Whirley Pop as opposed to the microwave, there exists the potential added inconvenience of time committment; it takes longer to pop and there's some prep time before and some clean up time afterwards, albeit small.
So what if any significance exists for me with the Whirley Pop? Does it have a symbolic meaning in my life? Maybe I'm grasping at straws here, but I believe it does. You see, over the past few years, for various valid reasons, I had begun to order my life, including my own eating habits, primarily around what was convenient for me. Being single, if I needed to eat, I could just throw a DiGiorno frozen pizza in the oven and get a few meals out of it. Or I could even cook an entire family-size Stouffers lasagna and get a week's worth of meals out of it. Now, I wouldn't want to overanalyze this habit of mine (although I can admit that the lasagna thing is a bit lazy), but I have been learning of late that becoming overly preoccupied with ordering my life around what is convenient -- whether it be eating habits, transportation or whatever -- can influence my worldview and how I interact with those around me without my even realizing it. In the Western culture in which we live, it is all too easy to fall under the delusion that we are kings and queens of our own castle and that we exist primarily to statisfy our own needs and desires. I feel as though our culture is built on this presupposition to some degree and we are certainly bombarded with that message in any number of ways daily.
I guess the Whirley Pop, with its popcorn that tastes better but is more inconvenient, represents an acknowledgment on my part about the falsehood of this presupposition. What is convenient is not always better for us and perhaps it may even be worse. Desire (in general) is not always good. Becoming preoccupied with myself can lead to the destruction of what I believe is our created identity -- to love others and God -- and is recovered/attained in part during the struggle toward unification with our Creator.
I realize the weakness of my position in waxing poetic about the dangers of the convenient modern life. I take any number of modern conveniences for granted each day, from the car I drive for transportation, to the grocery store I shop at in order to eat, the toilet I flush my waste away in, and the laptop computer I am using to type this message. As my Parish Priest reminded me in a recent homily in regards to fasting, "we all indulge, no matter what we look like on the outside." Perhaps what I am learning is just part of the natural maturation process. The older we get, the more we realize that life is much more compicated than we had previously realized and the role we play in it is a bit smaller than we had self-consciously hoped. I will close with a quote from St. Varsanuphius that sums up my position in a much more concise fashion than I have just attempted to do. And no, it is not about the Whirley Pop, good as the popcorn it pops may be: "forget yourself and know yourself."
