Clean slate

April. That went in a flash. Not much writing. (Plenty of moving boxes around – even unpacking a few.)

I’m still reading though. Still musing. One of the things that seems to be coming up on a number of blogs – and staying with me – is to do with being intentional, having goals, knowing what you’re aiming for.

Sometimes what we end up with is just more of the same. And life is partly like that: eating, sleeping, cooking, cleaning…add your ‘repeat’ activity here.

What I think I’m taking from these blogs, eBooks and so on, is also the notion of the clean slate. Being intentional is not just about doing the things you have to (maybe better, maybe with a different attitude); nor even about doing all the things piling up on that to do list.

It’s not necessarily about the ‘ought to’s either – whether that is reading the top 100 books of the 20th century, or any other worthy (and dare we say it, socially acceptable) form of self-improvement.

I came across a post recently, where the author looks at 40 approaching (me too, sooner and sooner), and thinks about what that means. Life half over? The best still to come?

I think what I’m taking from that, and the other ideas of being intentional, is that the clean slate is just that. It doesn’t have to be something that others expect – or even that we expect.

It could be: something genuinely new. A break with the past. Or something we have done before, restarted, with any guilt about abandoning it before washed off before we begin.

A clean slate is often to do with being given a fresh start. Where our mistakes are wiped off, as though they were never there. What we put on the slate now is ‘new’: to us, to others who may view it.

I like the invitation to include brand new things. To agree not to beat myself up over reappearing things, but embrace them again, with the expectation of joy that there was before.

I like the freedom not to judge what went before, to rake over the ashes – or the successes. Simply to turn, and see something new – even in the repeat items of my life.

What’s going on the slate? Don’t know yet. For now, I rather like looking at it, still empty, with all the potential, all the expectation, still hovering.

Sylvia Plath wrote this about her child, but I rather like the idea of applying it to other new beginnings:

“Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.’

Half-baked

I’m trying to write, really I am. But ideas just now are not ready to eat yet – they’re only half-baked.

When I do my regular school pick-up walk, it doubles as free-to-think time. (It also doubles as yes-I-do-take-some-exercise-actually time, and my own individual version of Springwatch at the moment, just so’s you know.)

There still seem to be plenty of ideas floating around. But none of them has settled yet. Or at least, they work just fine while I’m walking along the road, writing them in my head.

Come the evening, come post-tidy up time, and the ideas have taken roost elsewhere. Or they don’t seem to have as much oomph as they did earlier in the day.

Thing is, a lot of my evening time is to do with reading just now. Head down, working my way through other people’s blogs. Is it compulsion? Is it a recovery of enjoying reading – and giving myself time to do so?

And then, the tricky bit: am I writing what I want to write? What I see others writing? More to the point: do I limit my own writing because of what I see others writing?

——

Fast forward to the next morning. The gulls are flying across my view as I look up. Other than that, there’s no more limitations on my thoughts this morning than I make them.

(There are limitations, like planning food, and library trips, and getting washing dried, but I can choose to put those on one side for now.  Really. I can.)

You wouldn’t eat something that’s half-baked. True. Our stomachs can tell. But our brains: they don’t mind taking an idea, letting it stew. Or maybe steep, like tea.

When you pour out tea before it’s ready, you can tell by the colour. So you stop, let the rest sit in the pot, and wait. You know that, pretty soon, it’ll come to the right colour, the right strength, and you’ll enjoy it.

But actually, you only know that when you pour it out. Again. Have a good look at it. Sip it, maybe, for yourself.

Half-baked ideas and weak tea. It’s not much of a breakfast. But if I keep pouring, stopping, waiting, pouring again – sooner or later, the good stuff will come through.

I can taste it.

————

Here it is.

Stocking – or hoarding?

I seem to have bounced back from my kitchen blues – and now the freezer is filling up again. The cupboards are restocked, and the tops of the cupboards are restocked…you get the picture.

I like buying food (mostly). Today, the supermarket I like the best decided to have a major increase in its world foods range. New ingredients from other countries (affordable sushi rice?), even some of my regular ingredients from world foods stockers (yes please, butter beans).

So having put it all away (in cupboards etc, you understand, I didn’t eat it all), I’m trying to decide why what I thought would be a medium shop turned out to be…rather larger than expected.

Back in my eco month, at the height of the building work, I started looking at what it would be like to reduce the things around us. That process is happening, little by little.

(Clue: if you really want to do this, take a sizeable proportion of your possessions. Pack them into a room very tightly, so you can’t access them. Leave them for six months. Remove and ask yourself, ‘Why did I keep this?’ Then decide whether it really needs to stay.)

However, that process of simplifying doesn’t yet seem to have happened to my kitchen. Or at least, it did a bit. I turned out some of what I hadn’t been using in the cupboards, started using it up. (I even photographed some of that using up process, so it might appear on here some day.)

But it’s easy to fill it up again. This doesn’t mean it gets wasted (I hate wasting food) – it does get used. But I wonder which alternative ‘stomach’ I am filling when I feel the need to buy in more food.

I guess that when you are cooking quite a lot of gluten-free and dairy-free food, whilst also reading some vegan recipes on blogs, it’s easy to get pulled in different directions, ingredient-wise.

At the same time, I’m thinking about learning to preserve a few foods that currently end up in the freezer (tomato-based sauce, at least). So I might save some freezer space – and add to some cupboard space instead. Hmm.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty to be cooking with. So maybe it’s back to being grateful for access to a wide range of foods – and perhaps also for a small kitchen that limits my inner quartermaster.

Look back at anger

I was pretty angry on Friday night. Not only did I have to send myself to my room for a bit, it got in the way of writing too.

I calmed down a bit later – a bit of after hours kitchen therapy can help sometimes. (Pulling apart a cooked chicken is also quite effective as an anger management tool, but I can’t always rely on having a cooked chicken to hand.)

Sometimes we hope for things – and then see them slide away from us before we can grasp hold of them. Or we begin to try walking a different path, and end up having to rush back along the familiar way, because a loved one can’t go there yet.

We become angry – not just at the change, but at the promise of something different, and the promise being denied.

Anger is a whirlwind, a cyclone that seems both to knock you over and whirl you up into it. You are off your feet before you know it.

And half the difficulty is looking back down at normality, knowing that your anger has raised you ‘six feet above contradiction’. Because it seems like the hardest part of anger is the coming back down again afterwards.

In my grand scheme of posting everyday, I’ve marked this as Friday – but am actually writing on Sunday. That’s OK. It takes time to come back down, to be grounded.

Writing about it is part of the coming back down, the determination not to be caught up again. Or at least, not to power the cyclone  further when only the tips of my toes are still on the ground.

Sometimes, in anger, it seems easier to be whisked away somewhere completely different and not return. (And if you can squash a witch under your house in the process, fair enough.)

But we do have to return. We come back and find that life is still moving ahead, and if we race along a little, we can jump back on.

When I started that last sentence, it felt being like a film character, flailing their way along the platform to jump onto the train before it leaves the station.

But in fact, I think it’s a bit like a roundabout. Life goes round (don’t we know it), and every now and then, it’s best to get off and let it go round a time or two before we get back on again.

I’d rather do that than actually look back in anger (to quote the title of a play). Looking back at anger allows me to see that the cyclone has moved on.

I return, fearing devastation all around – and in fact, the cyclone has mostly carved its track in me. So yes, there’s rebuilding to be done, but less than I fear.

The chicken was good, too, as it turns out.

Kitchen confidential

Don’t tell the freezer (or the new-ish cooker), but I seem to have gone off cooking. Again.

Call it the changing light, and the possibility of less wintry food. But, more realistically, call it being on kitchen duty for the forseeable future.

Overall, I like food. More accurately, I love food. I love thinking about what to cook, thinking about food shopping, maybe even thinking about new ingredients and recipes.

Maybe it’s the aftermath of the building work. Lots of choices still to make – making choices about food too seems a bit much on top of discovering just how far plaster dust can drift around a room.

Maybe it’s the necessity factor. You can put off cleaning – you can put off washing clothes (for a bit, anyway). But you don’t get to put off eating in the same way – and where there’s eating, there’s often cooking, waiting reproachfully.

Some time back, when I had a full-time job elsewhere, cooking was my evening escape. Being creative, more in the moment, less thinking, more chopping.

Now, cooking is completed at the same time as multiple other tasks. It’s a race to fill small tummies. It’s refuelling the plane, rather than flying it. The view is not the same.

It’ll come good, I’m sure.  But part of my challenge to myself, just now, is to write where I’m up to. And this is part of it.

Meanwhile, I can think as far as a cup of tea. I don’t think that counts as cooking.