Enjoy life... eat out more often!
Invite your friends and even minor acquaintances to share a meal from time to time. You'll develop better relationships with others, and feel part of the community.
Nutley has great restaurants.
Eat out more often?
The phrase comes from a West Coast restaurant supply company called S. E. Rykoff, and appeared on the side of their trucks as "ENJOY LIFE! EAT OUT MORE OFTEN!" I noticed these trucks when I lived in the West years ago.
I moved back to Nutley after being away for years. I've studied the history of Christianity, but was never a church attender, after being confirmed as a yute. I thought one way to get to know folks in town again was to start going to churches, and meet others, and they'd love that I was actively interested in Christian history, and we'd talk about it in person and online. At one point I was going to all the Roman Catholic & Mainline Protestant churches in town somewhat regularly. I even visited and talked to the folks at the "Liquid Church" (a "non-denominational" more modern church that met for a few years at Franklin School on Franklin Ave.) I never actually found anyone in any of the churches that was interested in the topic (although during this period I did find the value of meditation), but as a result of attending Catholic Masses & Protestant services, I started thinking about these things from a "re-engineering" stand point.
I thought... the homily/sermon could be a blog or podcast consumed at any time, the music could be watched/listened to on YouTube, a bible study could be done via chat or a forum... and found that I broke things, not just the Mass into two types; "content & contact". All the content could be delivered and consumed over the web, but contact with other human beings at coffee hours & dinners could not be truly replicated over the web.
I started to look at the world as "content and contact" events. Church stuff, football games, trustee meetings, 4th of July fireworks, golf, concerts, plays, street fairs, book clubs, working out at the gym, etc... Everything I looked at and thought about I tried to break into "what's the content element?" & "what's the contact element?" And I found over time I was seeing three behaviors in society. There was the content, and there was contact, but the contact was broken further into two main types; (1) eating together and (2) doing some activity (golf, yoga, running, attending football games, etc...) together. Often, an activity followed an eating together relationship or event. People planned their activities over coffee at Starbucks or dinners together. Sure... people also texted & called to do this, but, more often than not if you are going to get together to go to a concert, you have already met & eaten together with that person sometime in your life prior to that.
I began to see the critical physical social event was eating together. When people eat together they talk to each other and build relationships. Since they are sitting at a table together it's a handy time to exchange mobile numbers, email addresses, USB sticks, a hug, and anything that requires or is easy to do during a physical presence.
And it's then that I reached back to the old S.E. Rykoff slogan to sum it up in a single phrase "Enjoy life... eat out more often!", or, since I was going to lots of churches at the time, I tried to explain this idea to folks in churchy language. I offered that when Jesus is reported to have said to "do this in memory of me", the "this" he was talking about was eating out together with friends.
Few know that not only Christianity, but many groups started or at their start were involved in, or evolved from dining clubs. Dining clubs were integral in both Greek & Roman society.
One could envision someone at a Roman dining club once saying "we should do this more often" and that evolving into a legend about a man named Jesus saying "Do this in memory of me", and now billions of people gather to share a ritual meal together. Why not gather, not just for a ritualized meal, but an actual meal. Why not...
Enjoy life... eat out more often!