Or more specifically, I ate without doing any of the following at the same time:

• Reading
• Looking for something to read
• Checking my email on my phone
• Responding to work email (though I do have to do that occasionally during my lunch)
• Looking for a song on Spotify or YouTube after seeing a mention in the music magazine I was reading
• Surfing the net
• Looking at Facebook or Google Plus
• Writing email
• Writing a blog entry
• Playing a game on my phone

Instead I just sat and ate.

This was the first time I could remember doing this. Just eating. I’m the sort of person who, even when I’m dizzy from hunger, would deliberately postpone eating the food in front of me, just so I could find something to read while eating.

I happened to have brought out with me my favorite salad from a local restaurant — ok, it sounds pretty decadent: butter lettuce, cherry tomatoes, avocado, macadamia nuts, mango citrus vinaigrette, and “coriander-crusted seared ahi tuna.” (It also helped that it was 70 degrees, without a cloud in the sky, in San Francisco in the middle of January.)

So I sat and ate. I noticed the different crunches that the lettuce and the macadamia nuts made, the way the cherry tomatoes would burst, the sudden sliver of sweetness from the sliced mango and how it contrasted with the tuna. I just sat and ate and thought of nothing in particular.

Look, I love eating this salad regardless of the circumstances. But today, I’d be damned if it wasn’t the best fucking salad I’d ever had.