Today is the first day of the Bahá’í month of fasting. The Bahá’í calendar is so awesome that it really deserves its own blog post, so I shall provide only a brief explanation here. The Bahá’í calendar consists of 19 months, with the final month spent fasting. During the fast, Bahá’ís abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset, making the arrival of the new year even more joyous.
This is my 11th year fasting, which is hard even for me to believe. The first year, I worried about everything. Then, after that, I found a breakfast that worked for me and ate it every day of the fast. That was typically oatmeal, Greek yogurt with berries, a hard-boiled egg, and half an apple sliced with peanut butter. It didn’t seem like a big deal to eat the same thing every day because, at that time, I ate the same thing every day for breakfast anyway: oatmeal in the winter and Greek yogurt in the summer.
But when you really love food, having only one meal that varies for three weeks gets a bit dull. So, in 2015, I decided to do things a little bit differently.
I had already started trying new breakfast foods throughout the year, and so I challenged myself to eat a different meal for breakfast every day that I was fasting. Individual components could repeat, but each meal as an ensemble had to be unique.
I also decided to start sharing a picture of my breakfast each day of the fast on Instagram. This may sound a bit silly, but it honestly made a huge impact on my experience. I got really into planning what different things I was going to eat, and as I started posted pictures, I realized that I wanted my food to look good as well as taste good. Gone were the days of eating from a plastic leftovers container. I would actually get up earlier—and be excited about it!—just so that I make some interesting food, plate it, get a nice picture, and still have time to actually finish eating it before sunrise. We eat with our eyes first, and presenting my food in a beautiful way helped me to appreciate it more.
Last year was was another major learning experience for me in terms of fasting, both in good ways and bad. The bad was that I spent a really excessive amount of time preparing for the fast. I spent so much time reading recipes and cooking in advance that I didn’t really celebrate Ayyám-i-Há, the pre-fasting period of hospitality, charity, and gift-giving. I was stressed, and I didn’t enjoy a lot of the food I was making (I’m looking at you, chia pudding). I’ve learned from these mistakes, and this year, I’ve decided to make fewer things overall, and to rely mostly on recipes I already know and love. I did look at recipes, because I enjoy it, but I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on it.
The positive is that it finally occurred to me that I should actually talk about why I’m fasting and what the Bahá’í Faith is when I post pictures of my breakfasts on Instagram, instead of only talking about food, which is really a small part of the experience. In retrospect, this seems incredibly obvious, but it honestly didn’t occur to me at all the first two years that I posted pictures. This was such a great experience, and prompted me to spend extra time reading through the Bahá’í writings picking out quotes to share, which in turn can has led to really special interactions with others. Of course, this makes my morning routine even longer during the fast, but it’s absolutely worth it.
This year, I’m continuing with my tradition of posting my breakfast pictures on Instagram, along with reflections and a quote from the Bahá’í Faith. I’ll also be updating this blog post with each day’s post, to collect them all in one place.
“Even though outwardly the Fast is difficult and toilsome, yet inwardly it is bounty and tranquillity.”
— Bahá’u’lláh
Caity Thinks 