“The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”
– Marcel Proust

All you can do some days is keep going.

I come into the kitchen and assess the production list for the day, keenly aware of my struggles to lose weight again.

Next comes reviewing the banquets for the day and make sure I block out time to individually decorate and tray the desserts people paid for, knowing that people I called friends are agitating for my death (intentionally or not) because I’m a Jew.

I build out the list, grab ingredients, and start mixing the day’s breads, fully conscious that my government is a joke and that folks like me are continually convinced to focus their ire on each other than the higher-ups with every reason to keeps us all angry and hateful all the time.

I make my silly little pastries, bake my silly little breads, and carry on like none of it is disappointing and hurtful and frustrating and sad. I do it because I know someone out there IS disappointed, hurt, frustrated, and sad, and what I make can be the One Good Thing that they get to enjoy today.

I can grieve. I can rage and piss and moan and cry… but not when I’m baking. There’s someone else’s day at stake then, and it’s not mine to ruin.

When I am having a Really Bad Brain Day™️ , the recurring theme in my mind is “When Does It Stop?” “When do I get to rest?” “Why can’t I just ‘no clip’ out of reality, watch it all, regroup, and then jump back in?”

This isn’t suicidal ideation, per se- it’s Being Burnt Out, Tired, and Entire Fucked Off of Existence, but it’s not necessarily “I want to off myself.”

The answer to my brain’s frustrated question is “That’s the fun part- it doesn’t.” Life keeps happening to you, with or without your say-so, until the moment it doesn’t anymore and there’s usually no chance at taking it back.

What to do then? I keep trying to Seek Stillness. A little more than compartmentalizing and a little different than Stoicism, stillness to me is a bit like wind through a screen door. The wind blows through, and even though it may push the door around, the door doesn’t catch the wind. It moves on through and remains.

Everyday at work, I find balancing between Seeking Stillness and Wei wu Wei, letting my heart and body do the work they know without the mind getting involved. The Mind races. It Plans. It Considers and Conjectures and Catastrophizes. None of that is necessary for what you love to do when you’ve done it long enough to be second-nature.

Shut the brain off. Zoom in to the work. The world will do what it does regardless of your opinion.

“What helps you lose track of yourself? What makes you feel at one with everything and bothered by nothing.”
Practically anything can answer that question- including booze, sex, hard drugs, bad mental health, apathy and sociopathy. A better way of phrasing the question might be “What makes you lose yourself in what you are doing and lets you carry that feeling afterward?”

Getting wasted on Saturday night feels great in the moment, but the next morning when every small noise and light feels unendurable and you are being summoned to function like a normal adult, I can definitively conclude you don’t still feel like you are one with the cosmos.

Even exercise can do it to you. In trying to get back into running, I try to remind myself how much I love The Void my mind sinks into. The meditative silence my mind can find as long as my legs keep moving and the winds keeps blowing on my face. At a certain point, though, your legs, knees, and feet make their opinion known. You can’t move, and all you can think of is the pain you are in. It’s not even a “good” pain then.

At a certain point, you’ve got to make your own Stillness. You’ve got to be okay with standing in the storm, feeling the rain on your skin, and letting the cold kill you.

Acceptance doesn’t mean enjoying or relishing the experience you are in. It certainly doesn’t mean preferring it or seeking it out. Acceptance is knowing that This Is What Is Regardless Of Me. It’s not personal. It’s not Out To Get You. It just Is, and you don’t get a say in anything about it except how you choose to react.

My “Way of the Floured Hand” requires zooming in on the details. It asks me to check the color of my caramel and to taste it when it’s finished to find that balance of creamy sweetness and burnt-sugar bitterness. It asks my presence as the pie dough churns and churns in the mixing bowl, adding the frigid egg whites at just the right moment to make a dough you can see the layers in before it’s baked.

To find this kind of stillness, to do the work well, I can’t let myself grieve the world all day. My thoughts aren’t on the crisping lavash crackers if they are aggrieved over the hypocrisy and foolishness my erstwhile friend enjoy. While I may not bullshit with my coworkers or joke around so much, I can still do the Work.

Box Breathing. Mantras. Staring into the Middle Distance… whatever keeps the storm in the background and the rain on my skin from sinking into my bones and making me shiver, because there is Work to get done.

And the Work MUST be done, or at least I must continue to practice and develop my craft in doing it, because all things end.

Eventually people will get tired of screaming at each other. The current conflict will end. The “activists” will slouch off to the next Great Cause, and people involved will be left to pick up the pieces. Among them will be people who love Life more than they love Being Right. They will need reminders of Kindness, how to be Human, and how to look each other in the eye.

Among those people will be those who want a better, kinder, brighter world- and we might all start listening to them. Listening, not Chanting, Yelling, Blocking, Cancelling, or Screaming for the fate of our Egos and calling it “justice.”

I have to believe that those people will be listened to, and we’ll start the work of building that kinder and better world on the ashes of our Anger and Disappointment. When that happens, those folks will need a nice hot piece of pie and maybe a cookie.

Stay Classy,