How our morning meal is much more profound than we would assume.
Toast? Tea? Porridge? Milk? Coffee? Waffle? Lemon cake? What is breakfast? Food, Meal, Lies? Sticky, Hasty, Crumpled? Adjectives, Scribbly, Punctuated? Crestfallen, Adamant, Bemused? Breakfast is a meal, loved, hated, eaten, chewed, and constanting a whimpering, unconstant world.
Many think breakfast is beneath them: their lofty, crepuscular selves, their supping, sleep-scorning spirits. Many think breakfast is above them; their hurried, frazzled lives, their inexorable schedules. And many do without breakfast on the sole basis that they simply cannot afford it.
Elliott Osman ‘26 said, “I’m not hungry in the mornings, so it seems kind of like a waste of a meal.”
There are, indeed, profligies of interesting words regarding breakfast. Ante-jentacular, for one, defines that miserable period of time before breakfast (must I abandon the willow-floating dream-land? Must I alight to the pointedly pointy world? Must I draw myself from my pillows? To the clamors and shrieks of life?). Opsony, a brow-bruffeling word, refers to any food anywhere eaten with bread. And the particularly unpleasant phrase, “Have a hearty choke and caper sauce for breakfast” alludes to gallows and gibbets and other unnecessary things.
Those words could very well be used to write a lanky article, full of blubbery information one could very well do loads to live without, or used to write a piece about a Kansasite ninth-grader’s glowering feelings towards muffins. But, to state it shortly, they aren’t. They aren’t being used in either of those ways, for no one in their right mind gives a brass farthing of their care.
They are, though, being used to describe to you the inexplicable feeling of resentment some hold towards beginnings. Is that not what breakfast is? A gateway into the unknown? A beginning of a beginning? An end of an end? (It isn’t, actually, about ending ends; it sounds interestingly poetic, though.)
Many hate mornings with a passion. They loathe them for no better reason than a strong aversion toward beginnings, a pounding fatigue, and a longing for sleep. If we were to remove the latter two, (which caffeine has, quite benevolently, ridded us of almost completely), would mornings glisten with prospects of a glorious day? Is it sleep that muddles up our lives, then? The fact that every waking moment of beginnings we simply wish to be unconscious, in a state soundly echoing death?
Some would shriek ‘Yes! Exactly!’ to that question while others would nod their heads dutifully, studying their covered feet, who, up to this point, have been nothing but lumps of flesh. For exhaustion is a dandy old scapegoat we cling to.
But our hatred is not directed to the slog of shuffling drowsily about exhaustion, but rather, spawned from the startling hatred of starting anew. When one begins something, they are stepping from the experienced, the understood, the done, the gone, to the brilliant glow of the nameless thing.
It is not a coincidence that the People’s Choice Dictionary.com word of the year was, in 2020, ‘unprecedented.’ We live in unprecedented times. ‘Unprecedented’ guides us like an unpredictable parent, steering us into caves and valleys, into woodses and laundromats. And, for some, into a swampy area of thickness and ugliness where they wish and they wish for an end.
“Tomorrow is a new day” has become a certain saying that the happy assure to the sad, though it evokes a jarring angst for what is to come rather than its intended opposite. For beginnings can be gladdening, vivid, and heart-throbbingly, breath-leapingly fun. But for the morning scorners of the world, they would much prefer to occupy the world as a dust-laden joy-wanting snook than flee the asylum of the eternally steadfast pillow, the root of the tremulous, spoonlious dreams, in want of anything kindred to beginnings.
Mornings have a friend just as bullied, just as beaten, just as insecure: Mondays. Not happenstance, no, that ‘morning’ and ‘Monday’ have gloomier, grimacier cousins; “mourning” and “mundane” evoke, perhaps, the same feeling of dread as the latter two.
But lest we should succumb to such fripperies, our lives would remain stationary, stolid, like a prinkling, wamblecropt frog. Neophobia acts as a door stop, stopping new ideas, new perspectives, and new things that cannot be named because no one knows what they are, from drifting into our minds and altering our state of being.
And what is breakfast? A frequent, a constant, a reminder as one picks their way through an unfathomable path that the world is not as horridly unfamiliar as they think.
