Growing up in New Delhi, India, I knew water was a scarce and valuable resource. The city’s water supply came through for a few hours daily and every household had to install pumps to haul it to rooftop tanks, so it could be stored for on-demand use. This is still the case in Delhi and I imagine many places around the world. Sometimes in the summer, the city’s supply would get interrupted and taps would run dry. We would then pool resources with neighbors to buy water privately; these big water trucks would come and fill our tanks instead.
Everyone knew that constant supply was only an illusion created by our overhead tanks. Over time, I started noticing the amount of effort it took to make water usable and drinkable.*
Then I came to the United States and saw that some people had a very different relationship to water. Many people brushed their teeth after lunch at work and a few would leave the faucet running at full force for the entire duration of their brushing session. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this made my insides convulse. We lived in Miami, Florida, which is surrounded by water so perhaps this created a subconscious sense of abundance.
While I never leave the faucet running quite like that, I noticed this sense of abundance quietly seeping into me over the years. I saw myself taking slightly longer showers when I was tired but what really bothered me was that on such days, it felt burdensome to turn off the warm water while lathering.
Then recently I visited Bogota, Colombia, where the city is facing a water-crisis due to lack of rainfall and each neighborhood has 24-hr water cuts a few times a month. We filled buckets with water in our Airbnb to ensure we could bathe and use the bathroom. Business establishments are impacted too, so the toilet at the neighborhood coffee shop was also non-functional.
I believe one of the most difficult tasks for humans is to keep our sensitivity and awareness fresh. It’s easy to forget the hard-earned lessons we learn during hardship. It’s easy to slide back into excess in the face of perceived abundance. I believe this is why most cultural and religious traditions have an element of periodic fasting.
Daily life keeps us spinning many plates with too many things to keep track of. So we deploy surface level awareness, which is perfect for managing overwhelm but doesn’t always create values-aligned action. I believe the goal of fasting is to re-sensitize us to the building blocks of a thoughtful life through intentional action. In fasting, we can’t partake in abundance unthinkingly. We are asked to remove ourselves from stimuli we take for granted, enough that we experience discomfort and take proper notice.
When we come back to re-engage with our daily life, we relate to it differently. Fasting is not an experience of lack, it’s an act of intentional forgoing. Conservation and waste, compassion and self-centeredness, gratitude and greed, self-discipline and overindulgence are all orientations and each of us carries their seeds. Any of us can slip into any of them given the right conditions.
Spiritual traditions liken intentions to seeds that grow roots when nurtured by attention, to create fruits of action. We mostly think seed to fruit, right? From intention >> to attention >> then action. But the seed is also in the fruit. We are products of our repeated actions. Our wise ancestors knew this. They knew that action sometimes needs to come first, especially when we have decision fatigue. That’s why all traditions also prescribe specific spiritual actions like fasting, selfless service and charitable giving (daana/tithing/zakat). Considerate action has the ability to wake up our intentions.
Fasting forces us to act first, notice discomfort, then notice the benefit on us and our environment as we slide towards a more thoughtful orientation.
When I got back home from Bogota, I found it easier to pause the flow of water while lathering. My awareness has re-sharpened and new habits have followed with ease. My showerhead has a pause slider that keeps the temperature mix while stopping water flow. It causes me zero-inconvenience to use it. Now when I’m tired, I leave the slider slightly open so I can get comforted by a warm water while lathering but it’s a trickle and not a deluge, and a choice not a default.
“Sow an act, and you reap a habit.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and philosopher
*Only 3% of Earth’s water is fresh water and of that, only around 1.2% is drinkable. A lot of energy and effort goes into making water consumable.
