Photo and Blog a Day Challenge-Day 18/28: Still

Bacon is wonderful thing. It's highly celebrated and often coveted. Not desired, or wanted, or thought about, but coveted. It's that strong in modern society. Almost to the point of necessity.

American Olympian and gold medal winner Sage Kotsenburg loves bacon to much he wanted his medal to be made of bacon. See here to find out if he got his wish.

In college I knew a faculty member and a manager in the campus bookstore that have little shrines of bacon, and their love for the crispy, salty treat is so well-known that many bring them gifts of porky happiness.

There are websites like bacontoday.com and ilovebacon.com that are far from a shortage of delicious praises.

There's also Kevin Bacon. And Francis Bacon.

And so if you haven't realized by now, bacon gets around. But like any other celebrity, it works hard for its fame. She works hard for the money.

Bacon sweats. Not to the oldies, though. But bacon sweats when she's put to work. And like you when you work out, sweating is not pretty, but if you sweat it out enough, you become a wonderful piece of art that is...I say again...coveted by many. What if you collected that sweat? Here's what collected bacon sweat looks like.

Like I said, it isn't pretty. There are specks of bacon that got lost in the workout. But there is plenty of bacon sweat. (Note the healthy options  in the background, mocking me and my fatty, crispy, salty treat I had with breakfast.) Here's another look at it.

I don't know if everyone does this, but I learned when I was younger to pour off bacon grease (and other used cooking oils) into a scrap jar or a bowl like this. Pouring it into the drain is asking for a clog, and pouring it into the garbage while still hot is also requesting a nasty mess. So glass bowl it is.

Here is said bowl nearly twelve hours later after I returned home from work.

(It seems that our friends the bananas are tired of living in the background, so I had one for a post-work snack.)

Back to our regularly scheduled program. Notice the difference. That's the same bowl of bacon sweat. Now opaque. What was a swirly translucent bowl of hot bacon sweat and specks of crispy goodness is now a bowl of oily cement, trapping the bacon freckles like Han Solo in carbonite. Quite a change. Much easier to dispose of, and less dangerous than its earlier form that could scald and scar.

You can agree when I say it drastically changed, yes? I would hope so, because it did. And how did it change? It didn't do that much, and I didn't do anything to it but leave it alone.

It changed by being still.

Yes, I know the physics of how it changed, and we can talk about laws of thermodynamics, and heat leaving the oil and yada, yada, yada. But, in a raw observation and understanding of what was before and what is now, it changed with zero coercion.

Shifting gears.

Extremes are interesting. X-games. Insanity. P90X. Crossfit. Veganism. Atkins. Heavy metal. Overdosing. Binge drinking. There's just something about pushing yourself to extremes that drives people. And I'm not here to promote or berate any of these, but seriously though, everything in moderation.

How much would you change by being still?

Think monks. Think meditation. Think shutting up and listening. Watching. Learning. Absorbing. Can it make you safer? Can it make you malleable instead of volatile and dangerous?

Yes it can.

So now that I've turned a philosophical corner out of one of Americans' favorite treats, give it thought next time it's sizzling on the stove. Maybe it isn't that you aren't doing enough. Perhaps you're doing too much.