Why dining hall plates are beyond beautiful

Every day, you probably walk into the dining hall. Tap once — or twice — to scan in. Then circle once, twice, to scan the options. Grab a plate (the big ones, of course; you aren’t going to put up with carrying two small ones).

Then you wait. And wait. And wait. Scoop some assortment of the warm food (or cool melons) proffered that day. Grab silverware, a drink (probably not water — haha, you dehydrated scholar) and finally sit down. After clearing your plate (hopefully, no waste is great!), you gather your fistful of napkins and precarious dishes before unceremoniously depositing them in their respective bins and buckets. Then, harried, you rush off to the next item on your 50-entry-long daily schedule.

Did you taste the food?

Really, we’re not much different from that lone plate. We are always overspilling. We carry different loads, but every day we get out there. We find a path, we are carried along and we serve along the way. We rotate on a carousel — get dunked, boiled and hung out to dry. Then we’re dusted off, polished and stacked with our peers. At night, we finally get to rest — only for the grind to start again. Blinding light floods in as a door opens and hands reach for us.

Sometimes, I see fellow Stanford-ers abandon their plates, leaving them in dark dorm corners to fester for a fortnight. Discards of previously known meals morph into galactic colors — colors yet to be seen in any establishment of proper edibility. I’ve seen people toss these ceramic plates into the garbage, reluctant to trek to the dining hall the next day.

This deeply saddens me — it symbolizes a myopic mindlessness, a shortsighted inconsideration for those around us. And if we are but plates in this daily hustle, I hate to think of all the ways I may have blindly bumbled and shattered someone else’s day as a wasteful byproduct of striving for productivity.

So today, I’m going to walk into the dining hall with a bit more mindfulness in my step. I won’t put on my podcast or music (even though post-Super-Bowl-me desperately wants to hop back on that Bad Bunny train I rode last summer). I’m going to taste the food. I’m going to listen to the music of the place I’m in and focus on the lovely humans bringing joy into my life — the people I run into and, of course, our wonderful family of dining hall workers. Living in hi-def takes an attentive eye and the willingness to behold beauty.

Carousels of weeks sometimes blur the plates and faces.

I challenge you to savor.

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