Trusting Your Instincts: A Tale of Two Meals
To be perfectly honest with you, it’s been a while since I cooked a meal purely from fresh ingredients. I can't seem to shake the feeling that it’s kind of a waste of time when there’s so many things I can shove in the oven and leave while I go and do something else. Of course, I am well aware of the fact that this is not a healthy or productive way to live. I’ve had the intention to get back into proper cooking for a while, I’ve been out and bought the ingredients - just for some reason I've never quite got there.Well ‘some reason’ is not entirely true, I know exactly why. I’ve developed this compulsion to believe that anything that isn’t work is of lesser importance, a sub-par activity – while my logical brain knows this is total crap, the illogical part is currently winning. But, this weekend, my logical brain won its first battle. Partly because of the creativity-sucking gloom outside, partly because I had a LOT of food to use up, I set to in the kitchen. With mixed results.
I’ll go into what happened, but let me finally get round to telling you the actual point of this post. Over the course of my two part cooking extravaganza, I learned a valuable lesson not just about cooking, but about creativity in general. I am a chronic overthinker, and this week I have been doing so more than usual (you should see the outpouring that didn’t make the cut for today’s post!) – this cooking escapade showed me in stark terms just how much that is affecting my work, and my creative life in general.So let me tell the tale.What I wanted to make was my mum’s cottage pie (which, now I think about it, I wrote about a while ago in this post about comfort food). Long story short, it is possibly my all time favourite meal, mostly for the memories it conjures of coming home to homeliness during dark times at university. My mum makes it by intuition, but she did tell me the secret ingredient, as well as all the other non-secret ones.And in the end, I ruined it. I second-guessed myself at every point, overthought every single element and did stupid stuff, like putting a load of water in and not letting it cook out. What I got was a largely flavourless, watery pie that leaked in quite a dramatic way in the oven. I was so focused on trying to get it ‘right’, trying to get it ‘perfect’ that I completely messed it up.
Contrast that with my apple tart. I’d been chopping up all the apples I’d bought for photo props while the overflowing cottage pie was happening in the oven, so I ended up quickly chucking the apples into a pan with unknown quantities of butter and brown sugar (plus a liberal shake of cinnamon) and put them on to stew while I dealt with the oven fiasco.After a good hour or so of stewing I poured the gooey apples over a pastry sheet and sprinkled over some pecans I’d found in the cupboard and a splash of maple syrup and wanged it in the oven for an estimated amount of time. And it was delicious. The flavours were well-balanced, the textures spot on - the whole thing was a bloody triumph.So what’s the moral here? When I was aiming for perfection and thinking through all the minutiae, I got something that, almost inevitably, failed. It was ok, it was edible, but I’m almost certainly not going to eat the three-quarters of a dish still left. But where I let my instincts take over, did what I felt was right rather than what I thought was right, I ended up with something that exceeded my expectations. It taught me that I actually 'know' more than I think I do.
And that got me thinking about the way I write, and what I write about. See, all my business and marketing content comes really easy to me – I don’t need to plan out what I’m going to say because it flows out of me, it’s instinctive. It’s these Slow Down Sunday posts that I find hard, because I agonise over them. Slowing down, as discussed in the intro, is not something I’m finding easy or natural at the moment. So I’m desperately scraping around for things to write, overthinking to the extent that I end up with nothing. I’m researching concepts to death before ending up deciding that I’m just not sure about them.I was never someone who gave much sway to instinct; I’ve always liked to plan and think logically and weigh up all the options. Going with your gut seemed, well, kinda reckless. But now I’m realising that when living a creative life, thoughts can get in your way and trip you up, jump up and down in front of your eyes so you can’t see straight. I’ve learned that, not just in my work but in my life, I need to get out of my damn head a bit more.
And that’s easier said than done, of course. I’m not going to be able to change a lifetime’s mindset over night. But I am going to try and stop overthinking these Sunday posts as a starter. Perhaps, rather than going over and over potential topics, worrying I’m underquaified to talk about them, agonising whether I can add value to you guys, perhaps I’ll write what feels good. What serves me on this journey to slowness. Because what serves me will ultimately serve you too.
What about you? Are you an instinct-truster or all logic and reason?
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