Start with Noticing
🍲 A Practice for the Table
When we sit down to eat, at home, with friends, or here at The Long Table, there’s a small window at the start of every meal that might just be more important than how delicious the food is, or how hungry we are.
Before the talk of work, school, or plans, take the first three minutes just to notice.
Take a moment to notice what is around you. You never know what you might spot.
The smell of the food. The warmth of the welcome. The face of the person opposite you.
Say what you see. “It’s colder tonight.” “This bread looks amazing.” “You’ve had a haircut.”
It sounds simple, even trivial, and yet it does something powerful.
It settles the table.
It lets everyone arrive.
It turns the meal from a place of tasks into a place of rest.
When we start our meal with noticing, we build safety and connection before conversation.
People breathe more deeply. Shoulders drop. The table becomes a moment of belonging rather than performance.
So next time you sit down, try it.
Three minutes of noticing before the doing.
That’s where community begins, in attention, not agenda.
The Herbert house is a riotous place,
the back door slamming as a carousel of,
neighbours,
pets,
family and
the kids friends and ours,
dip in an out of our busy lives,
and online is even livelier,
the red dot that howls for attention,
clocks up unread messages and emails on our phones
and we love and welcome it all.
Life lived at full tilt,
pulled by the apron,
the cashflow,
the leg,
the algorithm,
is a cliff with a tremendous view,
and if we aren’t vigilant it yanks us over the edge,
a blissful moment of free-fall and then
WHAMO!
Burnout,
carnage,
and dysfunction of one kind or another.
So how to balance all this life?
Even a dog with its head out the window needs to pull over from time to time
and a shared meal is one such rare and magical opportunity.
To connect with each other,
and have just enough attention,
-no-mean-feat with boisterous kids or sassy teenagers,
we’ve always waited until everyone is holding hands,
and then given thanks for our food,
doing our best to find a calm centre of gratitude
for all the grace that made the meal and us being together possible.
This intentional and sometimes,
blissful,
divine,
honouring,
awkward,
act of finding a collective calm
and taking our place in the humungous scheme of things
is prerequisite to all great meals
and to pass-on this daily ritual
is akin to a eating a boiled egg without salt.
It also helps tee up a conversation of noticing [as above]
and for that
I am truly grateful.
Amen.
