90% is Just Showing Up

A friend came over for dinner this evening.  One of our favorite restaurateurs has opened a new place in my neighborhood.  We walked down for a glass of wine to check the place out before coming back to "play in the kitchen": we both enjoy cooking.

To mark a landmark birthday for me a few years ago, the two of us took a meandering trip around Tuscany.  It was probably my best trip ever, although I have to say that I did grow weary of tourist-laden "hill towns" after a couple of them.  One day as we were driving in the countryside, we saw a sign for a town we hadn't heard of and which didn't show up on our map.  We decided to check it out. It wasn't without tourists but more like dozens instead of thousands, and there were actually unique shops and restaurants.  We found a little side street and wandered into the best dining experience of my life.

As a cook, when I have a great dish in a restaurant, I immediately make notes so I can try to reproduce it when I return.  I believe our wild boar with chocolate, pine nuts, and aromatic spices and tagliatelle in white truffle sauce was the best mean I've ever had.  (So good that I didn't even note the dessert, which is usually the focus of my attention.)  I still have my hand-scribbled notes attempting to capture its essence for later experimentation.

There are cooks who could just walk into the kitchen with those ingredients and start creating.  I am not one of them.  I am good at following recipes, and I am better than average at taking a recipe and modifying it until it hardly resembles the original.  But, I do need something with which to start. After years of searching, I finally found an adaptable recipe, and we played with it.  We smelled lots of aromatic spices--mace, allspice, clove, nutmeg--to try to figure out which had probably been in the Italian version.  We aren't there yet, but we are moving in the right direction.

I had promised to write for at least 15 minutes a day, but by the time we dined, watched a movie and my friend left, I was tired...and uninspired.  Since my TV sabbatical last week, I haven't watched much, so I caught a favorite show on demand.  I was still not feeling it.

I sat and prayed and meditated.  I shared my intention to keep my commitment and to write something every day.  By the time 18 minutes of meditation had passed, what was clearly on my mind was the phrase "90 percent is just showing up," inspired by Woody Allen's "80 percent of life is just showing up."  Apparently, my guides think that showing up is more important than Allen did.

As I pondered the phrase, I realized that there are a lot of things in life that we commit to do, but when the time comes, we try to weasel out of our promises.  We avoid. We put it off. We just don't show up. Keeping our commitments is foundational to integrity.  A missed commitment creates a "pinprick in our integrity."  The next day another pinprick. Next week another.  Pretty soon, we have a "hole in our integrity the size of the one in the Titanic," as Lizzie in The Game Called Life  said.

Today, I showed up to keep my commitment to write...and to protect my integrity.