Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #2: Three Raisins
The next exercise of Leadership Step By Step was to eat 3 raisins. This seemed simple enough, but there were a few conditions that made it a deeper exercise than it seems. The exercise required that you turned off your phone, and then fully engage all of your senses to focus on the raisin and eat it as if you’ve never seen or eaten anything like it before: touch it and focus on the feel of the raisin, take in it’s aroma, even listen to how it sounds as you squeeze it or as you chew it. When I really engaged every sense to experience the raisins, eating just 3 raisings became a whole new experience that took me about 20 minutes to finish!
For this exercise, I chose a unique way to approach each raisin from the start. For the first, I would consume it in miniscule bits. For the second, I would put the whole raisin in my mouth at once. For the last, I would put the whole raisin in my mouth, then hold it for as long as I could before breaking the skin.
I sat down at my dining table, phone on airplane mode and silent, with 3 raisins set in front of me. I picked up the first raisin and felt the bumpy texture on the outside, gave it a small squeeze, and started rolling it around in my fingers, noticing how crisp and flakey it was at first, but as I rolled it around between my fingers, it softened into a small juicy morsel. I then took the tiniest bite from one end and started to chew the tiny bit between my front teeth. I noticed how the texture was a little grainy, but the taste was sweet and tangy and I could feel the sourness hitting the back-right side of my tongue. The piece was so tiny and after being chewed I barely had to swallow. I went for a second tiny bite, searching and trying to find if there are more hidden experiences within the raisin that I hadn’t noticed yet. What could I experience that I haven’t yet?
If I were to write the experience of each bite and each raisin, this essay would probably end up being about 10 pages, so I’ll just give a short list of thoughts and things I noticed from my raisins:
- The depth of flavor – I felt like in different bites, I noticed something different. Sweetness, fruitiness, a spiciness (cinnamon maybe??), and a tangy-ness that really outlasts the raisin. Half an hour after finishing, I still had a sour tang on the back of my tongue!
- The feel – raisins can be solid, hard, flakey, crispy, dry, or juicy, plump, soft, and tender. And sometimes all at once, after enough gentle massaging!
- The sounds – as I chewed on different bits of raisins, some were more grainy and I could hear crunching in my ears, sometimes slightly unpleasantly, but other times, very satisfyingly.
I’m sure there were many more thoughts I had as well that I can no longer remember. It really was surprising how many things you can think about just 3 little raisins.
Not all of the experiences I had were directly from the raisins either! There were a few things that happened during the exercise that really had me thinking about how we experience the world every day. During my experiencing of the second raisin, the air raid alarm in our neighborhood went off (they test them about once a month). Normally, I don’t bat an eye, but as I was so focused on my raisin, trying to activate all of my senses, the moment the alarm went off, it felt so loud and so disruptive my whole body jumped! It made me think about how often I am usually just kind of sleepwalking through my days, not 100% focused on what I’m doing.
The last significant thing I noticed during the experiment was how much I started paying attention to my own body, in particular my own heart rate. As I focused hard on my experience of the raisins, suddenly I could feel my heart pounding throughout my body. In my arms, in my chest, in my neck, and in my ears, I realized that if I’m calm and focused on the present, my heartbeat is this powerful, ever-present life-force in my body that I couldn’t believe I don’t notice in my usual life.
The value I gained from this exercise is more than you’d ever think you could get from simply eating 3 little raisins. It was an incredible, meditative experiment in sensory exploration, self-awareness, and living in the present.
