I am not proud to admit that my boyfriend likes fast food, and while he has significantly decreased his consumption, he still loves it. Having outlawed fast food from my diet since the age of 14, when he mentions Wendy’s or McDonald’s he might as well be speaking a foreign language to me. I have eliminated the idea of fast food from reality; I drive by fast food restaurants and see right through them. The concept of considering eating something from one such place is practically blasphemous to my conscious and career.
Suffice it to say that fast food is blinding to America. It warps our perception on food preparation time, caters to our impatient need for instant gratification, and, in my extreme opinion, is more like poison than food. However, I am not too proud to admit that I learned a valuable lesson from Wendy’s this week. Last night my boyfriend had some late night Wendy’s, and since we were driving separate cars, we met up thirty minutes later, a thirty minute drive in which I racked my brains to figure out where there even was an actual Wendy’s close by to my gym where we had parted ways. After thirty minutes of thinking, I gave up and assumed that he must have gone to some back road to find his happy meal. It turns out however that the Wendy’s is right next to my gym, less than a tenth of a mile, on the same side of the street, and it is the direction I drive in to and out from work every day. I have worked in the same location for almost four years now, so I have passed this Wendy’s approximately 3,000 times – and that’s a conservative estimate – and never seen it.
If the Wendy’s-next-door was invisible to me a few thousand times, then how many other things in my life do I not see? This has propelled me into thinking about perspective and open mindedness, for how many things in life are right under our noses for years to which we are completely oblivious? Now, I am okay that my vision prohibits me from seeing the villainous fast food mafia that surrounds me in America, but I am not okay with being blind to good things and good people in life that very well may be right in front of me.
May we open our eyes to see the things in life that we are blind to.