Listening In On The Anxiety

September 24, 2023September 24, 2023 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

Yesterday, I went for a long walk through Mount Tabor Park before it would start raining. It was finally a cooler fall morning and this was to be my workout for the day, so I made a point of enjoying it. I wore my favorite tweed vest combo, my favorite shawl, grabbed my walking stick and just did my Hobbit thing.

I made sure to bring my headphones with me in case I wanted to listen to music or a podcast on the walk, but I didn’t think I would. I haven’t lately, and not for lack of quality in my favorite podcasts. (Seriously, check out Old Gods of Appalachia, especially as we get toward Halloween here in the states.)

Instead, as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve had the time and bandwidth to get more curious about my inner life- how and why my mind does what it does. Historically I’ve used podcasts deliberately to blot out intrusive thoughts, break the anxiety spirals and derail rumination funks that can sap my focus and energy. In other words, they put someone else’s voice in my head when I can’t bear the sound of my own anymore.

They are still excellent for that, but lately I’ve had the energy to explore the “bad neighborhood” parts of my brain and figure out what’s going on in there.

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Moving Right Along- Quitting, Sunk-Cost Fallacy, and Learning to Let Go

May 7, 2023May 7, 2023 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

Learning to let go is one of those skills that no really thinks of “mastering” until it occurs to them that they need to.

Depending on the circumstances, people can let go of things very easily. When whatever we are dwelling on feels inconsequential or already impermanent, we probably don’t care that much when we lose it or let it slip.

Other stuff, though- the important stuff, the intangible things- can keep us hung up for years as we learn that they were just as impermanent as everything else. Maybe we know that “this too shall pass,” but were hoping to get lucky in a macabre way- thinking we’d never get to see their end and thus it can feel eternal.

All things end, though. It’s the price we pay for getting to experience them at all, and it gives them their worth and rarity. Learning to let go with compassion and grace is vital to emotional wellbeing– and that can include letting go of goals and dreams as well. Giving up on an old dream can set you free to find a new one.

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Getting Your Head Right

March 4, 2023 / The Black Hat Baker / 2 Comments

I remember when my father, fresh off of some new training and then reconfirmed in team management training of my own, told me the Three Requirements for Change. They rang true enough in my own life and observations that I put them in my first book:

1. The need for change must be recognized. (I.e. “I can’t keep going on like this. Something has to change.”)
2. The nature of that change must be known. (“I need to ____”)
3. The idea of changing must be less terrifying than the consequences of not changing. (“Changing will be hard, but it’s gotta be better than if I keep going like I am.”)

I find myself in a position once again where change is needed. The third requirement is usually the toughest one to establish for change- people will often accept familiar misery over the unknown chance for happiness. In my case, however, it’s the second requirement that’s tripping me up. Where to from here?

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Cooking Like Yourself

November 26, 2022November 25, 2022 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

You might think it’s odd for a baker to go out and find other bakeries on their day off. I bake all the time, and surely I can make anything I want at home for a fraction of the price. Why should I go check out other bakeries in the city?

You might as well wonder why musicians go to other peoples concerts. Baking is my skillset and profession, and I definitely make a commodity, but it’s also a craft- and I like seeing how others practice it.

The same as there are different genres of music or literature, there are different cuisines. Within those genres, everyone has their own style. A way they practice their art that’s all their own, or a kind of art that they just vibe with and respond to.

There’s lots of ways to do this cooking thing, after all.

Animated GIF of The Stranger from The Big Lebowski sipping his drink and saying “I Like Your Style, Dude.” — I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to make another Big Lebowski reference.

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In Memoriam of What We Were

August 19, 2022August 20, 2022 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

“You cannot change how your story started, you can always change how your story ends.”

For plenty of people, those are wonderful and hopeful words of wisdom. It is hard, and we often need help to do it, but it is possible to rise above our pasts towards a future we want. That is an empowering, terrifying, and beautiful thing. A hallmark of our intelligence as sentiment creatures is the ability to internalize what we’ve experienced and use it to make decisions in the future.

This can be both a blessing and curse. We learn from traumatic experiences as well, and healing from that is as much a (re)learning process as a spiritual/emotional practice. When things happen that really and truly shake you to your core, you can’t always just dust yourself off and go again. If you think you can, I congratulate you on your compartmentalization and/or sociopathy.

The truth is that, even if you think you’ve recovered from a difficult experience, there is no returning to the person you were before. It’s a “what is known cannot be unknown” sort of thing. Before, you didn’t know you could be hurt like that. You didn’t know you could fail that hard. You didn’t know whatever it was could hurt so much. It’s the price we pay for being thinking, feeling, loving creatures- but it’s a price we never consciously think we must pay until it happens.

When it does, we learn. We learn to wake up the next morning and keep trying. We recover, we hope, and we carry on. We also need to mourn the people that we were- because that is never coming back, and it’s something I’ve been wrestling with a lot recently.