Life's work is waiting
Mind-You archives
When it comes to winter cooking sprees and evening kitchen etiquette, my family know this is often a zone prefaced by the harsh-but-well-meaning guideline, ‘please just get out and leave me alone.’
Because when I am cooking, I am not just tossing food in a pan. I am not even following recipes. While I am, at best, pretty average — with a knack for obsessively rotating my very Rosie-friendly repertoire, it is mostly because when I am in the kitchen, I am not just in there to make food.
I am there to process…. The day. My own mind as it approaches repetition and monotony. My aptitude or resistance to embodying a loosened, ‘off-duty’ type of physicality. To dance. And to soak myself in that of others with the help of podcasts, voice notes, or instrumental tones.
I love a collaborative kitchen, don’t get me wrong. But for some reason, this seems reserved for summer — doors open, breeze blowing, less time stood over the stove and more a tossing together of multiple hands forging toward the completion of many-a-meze. Or perhaps, right now, this unsociable gastronomy habit is owing to the fact I have just come back down to earth after a few weeks of kitchenlessness. On the move and outsourcing meals to delivery apps, clamorous restaurants, rigidly set operating hours, and ‘windows’ of time to scoff and fuel between important meetings.
It’s wildly fun. But sort of destabilising. As I entered the zone this evening, I listened to a talk with Casey Beros, who cannily articulated the particular limbo I now find myself in as my daily obligations transition into a new rhythm… She spoke of the tension between wanting more, and wanting less. The dissonant urge to nurse both a rapacious hunger for ‘more influence, impact, contribution and connection’ (in short - to build a big life), while also tending to a genuine, gentler desire for less. ‘Less screen time, less rushing, fewer decisions to be made, less junk in the cupboards and weeds in the garden.’ Seems to be we are straddling two worlds, she carried on musing. “Complete overwhelm….and complete underwhelm. Why can’t we just be perfectly whelmed?!”
To find my place within the balance this week, I am doing what my mediation app so graciously prompted in the form of its daily aphorism: ‘be where your feet are.’
Here, stood inside this first week of June — first week of winter — and noticing it’s a place I’ve stood before. Three years ago to be precise. And because I’m not quite ready to reveal what’s been percolating of late, I’ve decided to re-share from the old Mind-You archives to buy more time. I hope wherever you find yourself on the spectrum of ‘whelm’, inside the grand scheme of our collective big life, and whether cooking alone or in company, these words won’t add to your pile but somehow offer to simplify it.
03 / 06 / 23:
There was this one Christmas where Grandad Brucie won a small profit from a Lotto draw, after 30 years of diligent weekly patronage. He decided the most appropriate way to divvy out the dosh was to shout his entire family a skydive on Boxing Day. The morning of, it was quite a spectacle to observe the pyscho-dynamics of our largely facetious and performative clan curdle in the face of existential reflection. It’s funny how we flirt with what we fear like this. On the surface it’s self sabotage, but chip a little further and what we usually find is a ‘yes’ to external risk is in fact a way of short-circuiting our pride. Recalibrating, as the illusion of control is exposed as a dubious, self-constructed cuddly blanket. We know we need it, we just can’t admit it outright.
After a near 3 years of diligent weekly patronage, I've quit my job. And just like what was witnessed on that (totally fine and anti-climactic) skydive day, I handed in my notice feeling petrified I would never have the choice to reclaim what I gave up if I went ahead. As is true of any weighted decision across the board, this is typically the most appropriate moment to jump.
It’s scariest having an era or phase end knowing you made the choice. You rocked the boat, killed the switch, let the leash go. But maybe these changes are the biggest, most grown up, most hindsight-rich ones. When you weren’t forced into it, or given no option other than to adapt. Instead you looked, at length and with honesty, and decided to follow the flickering thing that appeared inside.
*And forget not how utterly privileged you are in even having the freedom to do so.
Being a serial idealiser I can attest: it’s fun to rehearse the fantasy. Untouched and unlimited. But on opening night, when the murmur of the expectant crowd is on the other side of the curtain and it’s actually happening? That’s some serious nausea.
I had spent countless (salaried) hours lost in puckish playback-loop fantasies about this very liberation, and now wanted to immortalise all it had given by holding things tighter than ever. Suddenly fetishising the banal dimensions of office life, entering a short lived and ill-fit phase of watching ‘Suits’ just to hang onto some thread of corporate doublespeak and the ever curious arrogance of rapacious professional males. In truth, it was a feeling of distrust. A kind of limbic friction that at the time didn’t allow a full tipping into excitement for this newfound freedom…With unbounded options and a free-for-all sense of time and self as I go forward from here. Emotions rampant and open, attractions elevated and charged by the romanticism of travel and its gift of glorious self-delusion. I don’t know if I trust myself without obligation to, or direction from, some form of structure and contract anymore. I had liked the version of myself that this job nurtured: sort of detached, effective, clear, on schedule, mature.
When everyone is off on weekends it feels ok to relax and unfurl. Safe and sound. Soon though, when they’re all back at it and I’m the one blissfully unreachable and unemployed, there’s likely to be an ambient charge coursing through me - unrest. Is it a bit woeful to have toyed with the idea of staying looped into Teams chats and the knowledge of projects ongoing? (short answer, yes.) Not because of some sick addiction or love of the actual work, or a persistent FOMO. But a need to feel important - like I am still contributing to something. Feeling required and involved.
I’ve just seen and known the perils of too much spare time and self enquiry. Necessary to a point, but then the toiling and turning over of thoughts and personal perceptions needs to be dropped. Some commitment to a common, bigger thing needs to rescue and reclaim your attention.
Now I find myself excessively journaling about it. Like I’m in preparation for some inevitable amnesia and the things that have me so enraptured in the simple and predicable now will no longer be retrievable once the context is altered. Journeying through this flawed ideological position saw a compelling first stop at the rational vantage point: ‘if it’s not broken, why fix it?’ And was called to a welcome halt as I plunged into the epiphanic words offered up by an amiable foreign waiter:
“There is no better thing in life than travelling. Oh wait.. maybe actually being in love. Wait! No better thing in life than being in love AND travelling.”
A little test drive trip to Australia last month served as a decent marker. I returned resolute and certain: it’s never not the time to prioritise the life story. As one friend and I often sign off obscurities brought about by the self-splitting trance of adventure: well well, one for the memoir!
Beyond empty ‘glamour travel’, this is what reminds us we are alive. Grooving in time with humanity, part of something bigger. In love with a person, a place, or just a perspective - who cares, all great! Placing that same yearning I had mistakenly outsourced to a particular business efficiency app back into the hands of the mystical idea we call destiny.
On-site at my last work event a few weeks ago, Senior Aboriginal Man, Uncle Mickey O'Brien, shared something during his Welcome to Country that has really made its way down deep: in Aboriginal language there is no directly translatable word for goodbye, because it is their view that relationships - however brief or monumental - remain with us forever. An acknowledgement that the ending of one experience will soon transmute into the next beginning.
So bubbye, bon voyage, life’s work is waiting.