Wellness

5 Simple Steps to Do the Thing

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I have been thinking about what to write in this blog post since I left work yesterday afternoon. In the time between then and now, I was preparing myself to sit down and write.
I also went for a long hike around Mt. Tabor, enjoyed a game night with my housemates, baked a pie, had a bit too much whiskey, slept in, ate breakfast, went for a run, meditated, showered, gamed a bit, and fixed myself a cup of tea.

All of it has been in service to writing this, because if you want to write about Life and Food and Joy and Good Things, a big part of it is getting those things in your life. The bigger part is actually sitting down and writing the thing. Far from being the sole difficulty of creatives, dreamers and nutcases like me, you can find difficulty in Doing the Thing in just about any human pursuit. I think it’s something to do with being sentient robots made of meat and untanned leather, stuck on a speck of dirt rocketing through the void.

So let’s go through my Five Simple Steps to Do The Thing together!

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The Long Train Coming- Finding Balance Between Patience and Relentlessness

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If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, first off- thank you!

Secondly, I hope that I have made one thing clear about my life “behind the scenes” of these missives; that is that I still consider myself a “work in progress.”

As much as a self-help advice tone as this blog takes, in all honesty I have to admit that it’s because I am working on it for- and on- myself. Given that and the fact that my own first book was essentially a self-help book (albeit focused on fitness,) it’s not surprising that I pick up some self-help books myself. You learn to write by reading, after all.

Most of them say the same kind of things; truly, some wisdom IS universal, and writers just put different curtains on it. One book I finished recently, however, pulled off a little twist that made me smile.

The author meditating
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Back To Business

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One thing about learning personal discipline relatively late in life that (I wonder) if people think about is the fear of losing it.

Growing up, I was always a very principled kid, but definitely not a diligent or disciplined one. I’d put off homework and assignments to the last minute, I’d barely study, and just count on my native smarts to carry me through tests, classes, and challenges. So, for a bright kid, my grades sucked. Hard.

I don’t think I really gained self-discipline until culinary school and deciding to get in shape. For culinary school, it was finally the chance to do what I wanted. I knew how much I screwed up in school until then, and I wasn’t going to whiff this one.

In terms of getting fit, I had seen in myself and the health of loved ones that this really was self-preservation. I was angry, I had the time and energy, and (to start with) I was spiteful. If we could get spite to turn a generator, the energy crisis would be solved, and the ultimate renewable fuel source would be Twitter.

Willpower, self-control, and self discipline are like muscles. You have to work on them, gain them, develop them and train them- or you lose them.
The good news is, the more you “flex” your discipline, the more you want to.
The bad news is that, when you stop, you need to get them back.

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“Everyone Else Is Taken”- Finding Identity in the Kitchen

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I absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, tell you who you are. You really shouldn’t want me to anyway. Brighter minds than mine have peeled apart the notions of “self” and “identity” for centuries (if not millenia) and even they tend to wind up shrugging and going “I dunno… it’s personal I guess.”

A portrait of Oscar Wilde in grayscale with the quote "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

And it is. I wrote a few weeks back about how to find your “culinary voice”– which ultimately came down to an elaborate rephrasing of “garbage in, garbage out.” That’s figuring out how to best tell your story though… finding out who you are takes people their entire lives, and is often subject to change.

So this post isn’t a “how-to”- it’s more of an exploration of the question, and especially what it means for us cooks- whether we are brand new and trying to find a place to fit in, or old hands getting flexed out of an industry that we can’t continue in and survive. Both groups- all of us, really- wind up looking at themselves in the mirror and asking, “Who are you?”

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