Gluttony
By Peter LloydThis is the second in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Gluttony.
In order to truly appreciate the role I play as one of the Seven Creative Juices, you must try to imagine the first human creative act. Picture the Garden of Eden and our first parents. They're just about to eat the only thing they've been forbidden to enjoy--food.
What they are about to do can be called creative, if only because breaks the rules. Eating it, they've been told, will give them knowledge, understanding, a look into what they've also been told is the special realm of the ultimate creator.
Well, know we know. There's good and evil. Our job is to increase the good and diminish the evil. The Biblical allegory tells us that we asked for it. So here we are. Now you'd be hard put to find a culture that doesn't make creative hay out of food and the innovative consumption of it. In the process, we've learned what happens when we do too much of it.
And that's where, unfortunately, I get a bad name. Some like Thomas Aquinas have gone so far as to argue that it's wrong to anticipate a good meal. Good grief! Or to eat too soon, too eagerly, or even too daintily. My goodness! It's impossible to eat a good food without enjoying it. The alternative is to starve, if you believe, as I do, that there's some pleasure in all food and drink.
You see, food, and the total indulgence of it, is at the core of human creativity. No doubt the first time you did anything creative, it had something to do with a feast. Those hideous masks and costumes you made for your first Halloween, that orgy of sugar, apples, and pennies.
And then, of course, there's Christmas. The Christmas pageant, the piles of presents, cans of cookies, more of everything than you'll ever need.
How happily I inspire production, sales, service, transportation, and more downright, out-and-out consumption. More than any of the other Creative Juices. Without me, life would be a slow day in a bread line in Red Square.
No, there's not a backyard barbecue or international wine tasting I don't attend. Thank me for your epicurean delights, your five-star restaurants, all of life's finer indulgences.
Enough talk. Go on, now. Eat! Eat! And pass the cheesecake.
Read all Seven Creative Juices: Pride, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Envy, Anger, and Sloth.
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