Habit

Breakfast has been my favorite meal of the day for most of my adult life. I consider most breakfast foods superior to lunch and dinner foods, and I have generally looked forward to breakfast more than to any other meal.

Except that in the last year or two, breakfast and I have had a bit of a falling out.

It started a couple summers ago, when I suddenly and dramatically lost my taste for oatmeal. I don't know if you can fully appreciate how traumatic this was for me. I had been eating oatmeal almost every day for about six years at that point. I even had a special oatmeal routine that I would follow almost every morning:

1. put 1 cup of water on to boil in the special oatmeal-cooking pan
2. spoon brown sugar into a happy face cereal bowl (the happy face cereal bowl is super-important)
3. sprinkle cinnamon on the brown sugar
4. pour a heaping 1/2 cup of oatmeal into the boiling water and stir
5. put the stirring spoon into the bowl so the tip is just barely in the brown sugar
6. count to seventy
7. taste the brown sugar that is now stuck to the spoon
8. pour the oatmeal into the happy face bowl
9. stir completely
10. sit down at the table and eat a piece of fruit while the oatmeal cools
11. pour a little milk in the oatmeal and stir just the top portion of the oatmeal
12. eat the top portion
13. repeat steps 11 and 12 until there is only a little more oatmeal sticking to the sides of the bowl
14. pour some more milk in the bowl, swirl it around, and drink it
15. hand wash the oatmeal pan and happy face bowl so that they are clean and ready for tomorrow morning

And then one fateful morning, I found that I just couldn't finish my oatmeal. I thought I would be sick after a few bites, and ended up pouring half of it down the sink. Over the next several days (and then once every few months or so for the next year and a half) I kept trying, and could never make it through the meal. I didn't know what had happened. I felt lost. I felt betrayed. And worst of all, I no longer knew what to eat for breakfast.

I've made do since then. Sometimes I will toast bagels. Sometimes I'll pour myself a bowl of cold cereal. Sometimes I'm mix up some pancake mix and make pancakes. Every once in awhile, when I have homemade bread on hand, I will make French toast. You'd think that having more choices would make breakfast even better than when I ate the same thing every day, but I feel like breakfast has lost its luster. I just don't get excited about it anymore.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a Radiolab podcast where they were talking about choices and decision-making. They had Barry Schwartz on (he's the one who wrote The Paradox of Choice - I know a few of you have read that) and he talked about how, while it's important to have choices, having too many choices makes us less happy. There's a lot that I could say about this subject, but I won't right now because the point I want to make is that I think the reason I've stopped enjoying breakfast quite as much is that I now have to deal with making choices. Before, I just knew I would eat my oatmeal, and in fact I knew precisely how I would eat my oatmeal (see above), and I was very happy with that. Nowadays I can choose bagels or pancakes or cereal, and choosing one means I didn't choose another. If I eat cereal every day, having pancakes on Saturday is special. If I can have cereal or pancakes every day of the week, the pleasure of eating pancakes is tempered by knowing that I had to give up cereal that day in order to eat them, and therefore neither the pancakes nor the cereal are anything to get excited about.

But this morning, for the first time in about eighteen months, I made myself some oatmeal for breakfast, finished the entire thing, and actually enjoyed it. While I don't think I'll ever go back to the oatmeal-every-day thing, breakfast and I may yet have a reconciliation. Deep down inside, I still think breakfast is the best meal of the day, and I'm willing to do what I need to in order to rekindle that old flame.