What an odd and multi-functional phrase that is, “playing favorites.” Sometimes it means picking your favorite tune, or your favorite quarterback, or your rooting for your favorite team.
As I was fumbling around the other morning, looking for one of my favorite couple of cups, the ones I use to bring the morning coffee to my wife and to myself, some little bell inside of my head dialed up a question for me to ponder.
(Stanley S. Smith/Borderzine.com)
I know that some mornings, I am content to bring whatever is available, and other mornings I want to use one or the other of the two sets pictured. And on the weekend, of course, I have the special set I always use for Saturday and Sunday, the “workweek is over and what shall we today?” set.
What I suddenly became aware of was the pleasure I enjoy in choosing and using those special cups. Why so much pleasure from such a simple thing? What is the nature of that strange creative process that emerges from some attraction to a “thing,” and then grows into a ritual that elaborates itself?
The complication deepens the involvement and increases my pleasure. Now it involves anticipation, and choice, my own autocratic choice, undisturbed by any negotiation, yet simultaneously constrained by the rules I myself have put in place.
The special set of cups for weekends. (Stanley S. Smith/Borderzine.com)
I am in those moments almost a free agent, unencumbered by any demands from anyone else. I have built faithfulness out of making and serving coffee in special cups to my wife, who doesn’t have a clue about the complex web of pleasure I have created for myself.
I have, up until now, assumed, based on our human interactions, that the favored one gets most of the pleasure out of the favoring relationship. But my cups get no pleasure. My wife is unaware. I am the one doing the favoring, and following the script that I have written.
Somewhere tucked into all of this a question continues to puzzle me: is it the cup I discovered or the ritual that I created that keeps me faithful.
Yes, I agree, these little choices create meaning for us. Still, don’t you think we create these little choices (like the coffee cups) to mask the reality that in the greater scheme of things we really have no control all. Thanks, Stan, for giving us this morsel to savor as we embark on a new year.
Zita, thanks for your observation. I would agree that one result of “choosing favorites” is that it distracts us from the reality your describe: in the greater scheme of things, as you say, we have no control. But it seems to me the impulse may at times, be more self-centered and focused on what I can choose to do, how I can manifest myself. I imagine a flower suddenly and momentarily conscious and seeing itself in a mirror. It would have to turn and try to look again this way and that generating an internal warming beam: “it’s me, I see me; I am a me, and I am an I, and ooh, how exciting just to be.” That, at least is close to what I feel: true, the reality of my insignificance in the larger world is masked; but at that moment the larger world itself is masked, functioning only as background and just as it is for my imagined flower, its only function is as a stage for my performance.