However, in all fairness, the way I discovered it was through a visit to a friend's house on January 1st where I learned that apparently this was a "Southern" custom. Ken, originally from Texas, was boiling a wonderful and aromatic pot of black-eyed peas (along with a variety of other meats, vegetables, and spices) when my look probably just said it all. To this Brit the custom might as well have originated on Mars, it was that "foreign" to me!
Then, preparing to write this New Year's blog I did a little research on this intriguing custom only to find out that this is in fact a Jewish tradition that dates back thousands of years and was first recorded around 500 CE in the Babylonian Talmud!
"Abaye said, 'Now that you have said that an omen is significant, at the beginning of each year, each person should accustom himself to eat gourds, black-eyed peas, fenugreek..." [Read more]
Although I did not partake in this particular custom this year, it is certainly on my agenda for next year! However, I guess I did partake in a sort-of "food" custom this New Year's...I became a "Sardine". I guess technically, I became a "Committed Sardine".
And what's a "Committed Sardine" I hear you asking. Well, the best way to describe it is to use the 21st Century Fluency Project's own description as follows:
First, an aside. A blue whale is the largest mammal on earth. An adult blue whale is the length of 2 1/2 Greyhound buses put end to end, weighs more than a fully loaded 737, has blood vessels large enough for an adult to swim down, a heart the size of a Volkswagon Beetle, and a tongue 8' long and weighs 6000 lbs. A baby blue whale is estimated to gain more than 50 pounds an hour from birth to age one. (now that's a high fat diet - certainly not Atkins). The blue whale is not only the biggest, but the loudest animal. At 190 decibels, a blue whale's call is louder than a jet (140 decibels), and much louder than a person can shout (70 decibels).
A little known fact is that a blue whale is so large that when it decides to turn around, it can take 2 to 3 minutes to turn 180 degrees so that it can swim in the opposite direction. As a result, some people have drawn a strong parallel between blue whales and our school systems. It just seems to take forever for schools to turn things around. Our ability to adapt to changing times helps explain at least in part the rise in demand for vouchers, charter schools, home schooling and virtual schools. There are some people who just don't believe or don't want the public school system to turn things around in time.
But compare the way a blue whale turns around (slowly) to how a school of fish turns around - specifically a school of sardines - which has the same or even a greater mass than the whale, does the same thing. A school of sardines can turn almost instantly. So the question that comes up is - How do they do this? How do they know when to turn. Is it ESP? Do they use cell phones? Are the using the Internet
The answer is simultaneously a little simpler and quite a bit more complex. If you take a careful look at a school of sardines, you'll notice that although the fish all appear to be swimming in the same direction, in reality, at any time, there will be a small group of sardines swimming in a different direction, in an opposite direction, against the flow, against conventional wisdom. And as they swim in another direction, they cause conflict, they cause friction, and they causes discomfort for the rest of the school.
But finally, when a critical mass of truly committed sardines is reached - not a huge number like 50 percent or 80 percent of the school, but 15 to 20 percent who are truly committed to a new direction - the rest of the school suddenly turns and goes with them – almost instantaneously!
Isn't that what has happened with our attitudes towards drinking and driving? Isn't that what became of our feelings about smoking? Isn't that exactly what happened to the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union? Isn't that what caused the Internet to suddenly appear overnight. Each and every one of those events was an overnight success that took years in the making. Overnight successes that took a small group of people who were truly committed despite the obstacles, challenge, yabbuts, and TTWWADIs to make the necessary change.
Noted anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote:
"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world -
indeed it is the only thing that ever has."
That's why we're Committed Sardines - Thinking Outside The Can!
This New Years I became a Committed Sardine! When will you?
