I recently baked bread.
There was one relatively unsuccessful attempt, followed by an absolute winner of a loaf. While both were tasty, one loaf was heavy, dense, and chewy, while the other was light and fluffy. What made the difference, in the end? I contend that the variables separating my dud of a loaf from the beauty you see below are similar to those involved in living out a successful spiritual practice:
- Dedicated time and attention.
- Attention to the process, rather than the result.
- Patience.
When I made the first, unsuccessful loaf, I did quite a few things wrong. First, I started at 9PM. I wanted bread, there was none in the house, and my sleep schedule was already off kilter, so I figured, "What the hell? Let's bake!" At the time, I was also marathon-re-watching a show (Hell on Wheels), and trying to fill up my time enough to distract me from the hard realities facing me this summer. I fiddled around with the recipe, experimenting without considering the consequences or truly paying attention to my choices. I was so focused on what I wanted (bread), that I allowed myself to believe that my slap-dash, hurried, bare-minimum work would get me to my goal that much more quickly.
But it was too late at night, and the true summer heat hadn't struck yet, so the house was cold. The dough didn't rise - at least, it didn't rise quickly enough for my needs. So I tossed it into the oven and hoped for the best.
When it came out, dense, chewy, and heavy, I was disappointed. But I still didn't care enough to stop and think about how much better it would have been if I'd taken the time to do it right. I simply slathered butter and jam on the chunky pieces I pulled off, and persisted in my willful avoidance of an increasingly stressful reality.
My taxes wouldn't go through, multiple times, due to some obscure error.
I needed my taxes so that I could re-certify my payment plan, so as to avoid another $700 student loan payment.
I needed my taxes so that I could finish my FAFSA for my upcoming first year of PhD work, because I hadn't saved enough money while teaching, and would need to borrow again.
I had to find a doctor to get some obscure piece of paperwork signed off to satisfy the state of New Jersey that I wasn't disease-ridden and could live in college housing.
There were lots of things that needed to be done, and starting any of these long, complicated processes seemed impossibly painful and tedious.
Logistics, paperwork, the minutiae of living in a world with regulations and requirements and taxes... these are not my strong suits. Hell, some days just showering and putting pants on seem like unnecessary hoops to jump through. Depression will do that to you.
_____
Fast forward: I've sat down, done my best to fix my tax situation, and endured a great deal of frustration in order to do so.
I've worked through three chapters of my German for Reading Knowledge book. I've survived four essays by Charles Sanders Peirce, which, believe me, is a feat in itself.
I wrote a blog post, connected with some old creative writing partners, and have collaboratively written at least fifteen new pages of creative work.
And I baked bread.
 |
| The successful loaf. |
How did I manage to do all these things? And why am I celebrating?
Ohh, good for you! You "got stuff done."
But it's not just that. Once I stopped thinking about my summer goals of "getting stuff done," and focused instead on the first steps (and nothing beyond them), these tasks started to seem much more manageable. When I started to see my responsibilities as a set of (sometimes unpleasant, but ultimately manageable) steps, rather than looming specters to feel guilty about, I was able to get out of bed a little earlier, get out of my pajamas, and let my curiosity (rather than my hedonistic need to be entertained) drive my behavior.
I stopped focusing on accomplishment, and started to think about the value of just doing.
Instead of polarizing "fun stuff" (like Netflix marathons) on the one hand, and "hard stuff" (productivity) on the other, I started to think about how much more rewarding those seemingly painful tasks could actually be.
"Real life" happens in the little, tedious, painful tasks, too, in those ugly tasks we Millennials often call "adulting." I think "adulting" feels so difficult because we have a deep sense of how limited our options are, and how poor the pay-offs can be. I have no illusions about how limited the academic job market is, especially for someone like me who intends to get a PhD in what my father calls "Thinkology."
But when you don't care about pay-offs, when you aren't distracted by a shiny but intimidating idol of future success, the business of everyday life stops feeling like a set of chores and begin to feel, well, normal.
_____________
Back to baking.
There's something so normal, so basic, so unremarkable about baking bread - at least on the surface of things.
The ingredients couldn't be more basic to the history of human food technology: water, flour, oil, salt, and the humble-yet-remarkable yeast. The technique is often inherited knowledge, passed down from parents to children (most often by mothers). Bread, aside from cheese and yogurt, is quite possibly one of the oldest processed foods.
It involves all the senses: the sight and smell of awakening yeast, the tactile encounter with the sticky dough, the sound of the squishing dough when you punch it down, a taste-test here and there.
But if you're not paying attention - to the temperature of the water, the proportions of the ingredients, the temperature of the oven - you can easily screw up a fairly simple process. Anything worth doing - from taxes, to learning German, to developing a spiritual practice - requires the following:
- Dedicated time and attention.
- Attention to the process, rather than the result.
- Patience.
When I approached baking and showed this basic level of respect to the process, I didn't just get a
good loaf of bread; I got a teacher.
My bread reminded of how worthwhile, how instructive, how illuminating simple, physical tasks can be.
My bread reminded me how life works - both in the metaphorical sense, and also in the literal sense: life requires energy transfers from up and down the scale of complexity, and that transfer happens often in small, unremarkable steps (like yeast causing bread to rise).
My bread reminded me that nourishment comes from somewhere, and that the most nourishing things are those which have unfolded and developed according to their own time scale - not mine.
I think there's something very evocative in the idea of "our daily bread." It is an image of survival, and sustenance, and providence. But in the end, it's just an image. Real daily bread has to be baked, and baking requires work.
I often get distracted by my own idealistic image of a future PhD. I imagine doing the work, writing the thesis, getting the degree. But when I get caught up in the idea, when I "live in my head," as I often do, the ideal slowly transforms from a life-goal into an intimidating obligation. It is easier to idealize a thing when we aren't actively, consciously engaged in the real, engaged, complex physicality of the thing itself. Even during my master's degree work, I had this problem. I was detached from my own work, and did not truly allow myself to be engaged in it - transformed by it - and thus focused on the ideal goal to the extent that I failed to learn from the process, to appreciate the outcomes that came naturally.
Getting out of my head and into my body is one of the primary goals of my spiritual journey. In order to do so, though, I have to remember the lessons that my bread taught me: don't idealize the goal. Idealizing the goal makes it an abstract, and abstracts can be toyed with, enshrined, appreciated, but never truly lived.
"All knowledge is rumor until it is in the muscles." -- New Guinean Proverb
No comments:
Post a Comment