Rules are funny things. They creep up on us, many of them unwritten, but still clear and hard in our minds. What we eat for breakfast, especially here in the U.S., can be a very limited, fixed rule. And complete nonsense.
I love eating breakfast for dinner. I’ll eat an omelet for any meal. Offer me waffles any time of the day with bacon and sausage and I’m ready to tuck in and join you.
But suggest that we have a hamburger and fries at 7 A.M. to start the day and you’ll be get a disapproving stare. How about broiled fish? Or maybe a nice chicken pot pie?
Try it. Chili for breakfast can fuel you through the entire morning and do it just as well as a bowl of oatmeal. Why we eat what we eat at various times of the day is a tradition, a cultural norm, and sadly, a product of generations of advertising. But it’s just a rule. No one will haul you off to jail for getting your meals out of order.
There’s a certain freedom that comes from learning about breaking rules. One of the first things you discover, like dinner for breakfast, is that it isn’t a rule at all. And when you discover that, the world opens up to you. What else isn’t really a rule? What else can I eat to break my fast?
Many of us were trained from a very young age about the rules or writing. If we received a good education we learned about sentence structure, grammar, and the basic forms of written communication. If we somehow stumbled into an excellent education, we learned to write more freely.
Learn the rules. They really do help with clarity. But also learn when something is not a rule at all. Boldly go where this newly open road leads you.
The Writers! Break The Rules—Eat Dinner For Breakfast by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.