The Notebook of Where and When: A Small Rebellion Against the Tyranny of Numbers
The Notebook of Where and When: A Small Rebellion Against the Tyranny of Numbers
The Day I Stopped Counting and Started Looking
There was a Tuesday in March, I remember it well because the garúa had just lifted from Lima and the sky appeared for the first time in weeks with that pale, uncertain blue we know so well in this city of eternal grey. I was sitting in a café on Avenida Larco, watching people eat their sandwiches with one hand while the other hand held a telephone, and something struck me with the force of a simple truth that one has been refusing to see for too long. Nobody there was present with their food. Nobody was in the place where their body was eating. And I thought, what if the problem was never what we put in the plate, but rather the fact that we have forgotten where we are and at what hour we are when we eat. From that afternoon, I began to carry a small notebook, the kind with cardboard covers that you find in any librerÃa on Jirón Quilca, and I wrote only two things each time I ate: the place and the hour. Nothing else. No numbers, no quantities, no guilt dressed as arithmetic. Just the where and the when, like coordinates of a life that is actually being lived.
What the Notebook Taught Me in the First Weeks
The first thing I discovered, and I say discovered because it was genuinely a surprise and not something I expected, was that I ate in more places than I had ever imagined. I thought I ate at home, at the office, perhaps at the house of my mother on Sundays. But the notebook revealed to me a geography of eating that was chaotic, almost nomadic. I ate standing in the kitchen while looking for my keys. I ate in the car on the Panamericana with the engine still warm. I ate in a park bench in Miraflores while reading messages from a cousin in Arequipa. I ate in the hallway of a building where I had gone to do a procedure and the wait was longer than promised. The notebook did not judge these places. It simply recorded them, and in that recording, I began to see the shape of my days in a way that no counting of grams or portions had ever permitted me to see. The hour, too, was a revelation. I believed I ate at regular times, the way my grandmother ate, the way the family gathered at one in the afternoon without fail. But the truth was scattered across the page like breadcrumbs. Some days I ate at eleven, other days at four, and once, I remember with a certain shame, at half past nine in the evening while still at the office, cold food from a container, the fluorescent light making everything look slightly dead.
The Liberation of Not Writing Numbers
I must confess that at the beginning, my hand wanted to write more. The years of reading magazines, of hearing conversations in the peluquerÃa, of seeing advertisements that promise a body corrected through mathematics, they had planted in me the idea that eating is an operation of calculation. That the plate is an equation to be resolved. But I made a pact with myself, a small private pact, and it was this: the notebook is only for the place and the hour. If I ate a plate of ajà de gallina at my mother’s house at one fifteen, that is what the notebook would say. Not how many spoonfuls of rice. Not whether the sauce had too much cream. The place, the hour, and I was done. I closed the notebook and returned to the conversation, to the taste, to the moment. And something loosened in the chest, something I had not known was tight. The act of eating became again what it was when I was a child in Chiclayo, sitting on a wooden bench in the patio, with my feet not reaching the ground, and the only thing that mattered was that the food was warm and that someone had made it with their hands.
The Body Knows What the Notebook Reveals
After two months, I went back through the pages and I saw patterns that I could not have seen from inside the days. I saw that when I ate in the street, walking, without sitting, I tended to eat again two hours later, not because of hunger but because the body had not registered the act, had not been told with clarity: here we are, this is the hour, this is the place, we are eating now. I saw that when I sat at a table, any table, with my back against a chair and my hands free of other tasks, the next eating came much later, and I arrived at it with a calm appetite and not with that desperate emptiness that makes one grab whatever is nearest. I saw that the hour mattered more than I had suspected. That eating at two in the afternoon was not the same as eating at five, even if the plate was identical, because the body carries its own clock, its own rhythm, and when we respect that rhythm the whole afternoon changes its colour. None of this required a single number. None of this required weighing anything or measuring anything. Only attention, only the gentle discipline of writing down: I was here, it was this hour.
What My Grandmother Would Have Said
My grandmother, Dios la tenga, never counted anything in her life. She cooked for seven people and sometimes for twelve if the cousins appeared without warning, and she never once measured a cup of rice with a scale. She measured with the hand, with the eye, with the memory of her own mother’s hand and eye. What she did possess, and I think now that this was her true wisdom, was a sacred respect for the moment of eating. The table was set. The hour was the hour. You sat, you were there, you ate with the family, and the food was food and not fuel and not enemy and not a problem to be managed. When I started this notebook, I felt I was returning to something she knew without needing to write it down. The place and the hour. That was all she needed. That was the entire architecture of a meal. The rest, the anxieties, the restrictions, the guilt, those came later, from other voices, from other times, from a world that decided the body was a project to be optimized rather than a life to be inhabited.
The Notebook as a Small Act of Resistance
I do not say this with grandiosity, but I do believe that in a world that wants to convert every human act into data, into measurement, into something that can be tracked and corrected and improved by an application on the telephone, to simply write down where and when is a small rebellion. It says: my eating belongs to me, to my day, to my geography, to my hours. It says: I am not a machine to be calibrated. It says: the soup I ate at the market in Surquillo at half past twelve, sitting on a plastic chair with my elbows on the table and the noise of the vendors around me, that soup is not a collection of numbers but a moment of being alive in a specific place on this earth. The notebook protects that. It gives the moment its name and its address without stripping it of its soul. And I think, perhaps, that this is what we have been missing all along. Not more information about what we eat, but more presence in the eating itself.
A Word About Those Who Seek Additional Support
There are persons who, alongside their own process of returning to presence and attention, feel that they wish to accompany the body with something additional, a small help from outside, and this is understandable and I do not judge it because each person walks their road with the shoes they have. In these conversations I have heard mentioned, here and there, a preparation called Esbelita, which is a complement for those who wish to support their body in the process of letting go of weight. I will say only what I know, which is that Esbelita is something that can be obtained only through its own official page, and that page is esbelita.fit and nowhere else, not in the pharmacy on the corner, not in the market, not through a cousin who knows someone. Only there, directly, without intermediaries. I mention it because I believe in honesty and in giving the information where it belongs, without pretending that such things do not exist or that people do not look for them. But I also say, with the same honesty, that no preparation substitutes the act of sitting down, of being in the place, of honouring the hour. That is the foundation. Everything else is only decoration on a house that must first have its walls.
How to Begin Without Making It a Burden
Some readers will ask, and they are right to ask, how one begins this without converting it into another obligation, another task that weighs on the day like a stone in the pocket. And my answer is simple, almost embarrassingly simple. Buy the cheapest notebook you can find. The one with the cardboard cover, the one that costs two soles in the market. Keep it in your bag, in your pocket, in the drawer of the kitchen. When you eat, and I mean when you actually put food in your mouth, you open the notebook and you write: the place, the hour. Three words, four words. “Kitchen, eight fifteen.” “Office, one forty.” “Bench in the park, five o’clock.” You close the notebook. You continue eating. You do not add anything. You do not comment. You do not evaluate whether the place was adequate or the hour was correct. You simply record, the way the sky records the passing of a cloud without judging its shape. And after a week, after two weeks, you will begin to see your life arranged on those pages in a way that surprises you, that moves you, that perhaps makes you laugh at the absurdity of all the complicated systems you tried before when the answer was this small, this quiet, this tender.
The Place Tells a Story That Numbers Never Could
What I wish to leave with the reader, if I have managed to say anything worth leaving, is this: the place where you eat is a story. The hour at which you eat is a story. Together they form a narrative of your days that no caloric count could ever tell. When I read my notebook and I see “standing, kitchen, seven in the morning, looking for the other shoe” I see a whole scene, a whole morning, a whole person rushing through a day that has not yet begun. When I read “table of my mother, Sunday, one fifteen, the window open, the sound of the radio from the neighbour” I see another person, another life, a slowness that is almost sacred. These are the stories of my eating. Not numbers. Not sums. Not subtractions. Stories. And I think that perhaps the body, which is not a calculator but a living memory, responds better to stories than to mathematics. It responds to being seen, to being placed, to being told: you are here, it is now, and that is enough. That has always been enough.
