"kill the fatoosh"

I am sitting in a Mediterranean Cafe on Sat night before my grand daughter's final dance performance at the NC School for the Arts. My son orders a dish from the menu and then emphatically says to the waitress without hesitation, "kill the fatoosh."


For some reason this caught my attention as an interesting statement. First, I thought, "my son is starting a new job in NY city Monday and he is practicing his "NY Mafiaism." Then I thought of all the times he had said, "I don't eat salad," and this a new and more direct way to order food.

This statement soon became something the family could banter around the table and have fun with my son. Later, as I continued to sound the phrase, "kill the fatoosh" in my head, I began to think about the ways people quickly cut off experiences in their life.

This can be positive or negative. For instance, we can develop patterns of thought over time that automatically reject some types of experience and never ponder what we may be missing. Do we all directly cancel opportunities out of tradition or habits we form over the years that never get questioned? Should we give others the permission to challenge us on these areas in our life that might bring us benefit we fail to see? Now, fatoosh is only a type of salad, but it may represent types of people or experiences God puts in our life and we shut Him down too quickly.

The opposite may also be true. Spiritual discipline involves "shutting down" habits or appetites that should be sent packing. Habits of gossip or judgmentalism or envy are really good targets for "kill the fatoosh."

Discerning the differences in what we quickly and directly forego can have a big impact on living the life we desire to live. What and how we order our meals may not have eternal bearing on our lives, but pondering the "fatoosh" in our lives that we instinctively "kill" is not a trivial matter.