What happens when an impromptu desire to make your own pasta strikes you in the middle of a working day? Should you act on that impulse? Or should you subdue the impulse citing professional efficiency and whatnot?
I decided to heed that impulse. And what joy it brought me. Making fresh pasta at noon, when the rest of humanity is busy with endless emails and mindless meetings was surprisingly freeing.
Isn’t it easier to buy pasta at the store? Well, yes. But it’s not fun. The joy that comes from crafting something with your own hands is incomparable. The involvement in the creative expression of oneself is what completes us.
The modern world loves to relegate us to ‘consumers’. If everybody made pasta at home, the pasta industry would collapse. The pasta business is in fact sustained by people not wanting to and/or not having the time to make their pasta. The industrial world traps people in meaningless work for eight long hours, which depletes them of any incentive to express themselves creatively. This makes us buy store pasta. This precipitates the need for industrial businesses – the pasta business in this case – which employs mindless pasta workers. This incestuous cycle is a cycle of slavery. We work to be able to buy and because we buy we have our work.
The way to escape this is to start producing your own things – however small they may be. As more people embark on the journey of being creators, eventually, we may be able to have more time to do the things that really matter to us – like making fresh pasta at noon on a working day!
Journey of a thousand words 