This or That?

A number of years ago home chef and writer Julie Powell embarked on a mission that may be the secret dream of many serious hobby cooks.  She committed to cooking her way through every recipe in Julia Child's masterpiece, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, during the course of a single year and blogging about it each day.  She accomplished this while holding down a day job. She did it, and I continue to be amazed.

When I heard about the project, I was instantly envious, and almost as quickly, I called back any jealousy.  I have neither the budget nor enough friends to help me eat my way through all that food, and quite honestly, I am not sure I'd like to eat some of it. Think eel or three different liver dishes for starters. But what fun to pick and choose and make all the ones I'd like to eat.

I've written many times in this blog about my passion for cooking, and just over the last few months (maybe since I started sorting) it has occurred to me that while I like to cook, what I love is baking. Since I have both a gluten intolerance and very high quality standards, making baked items that measure up on both those qualifications has been a 20-year challenge for me.  I get my feelings hurt when I am asked to bring a salad or vegetables to a potluck instead of one of my from-the-oven masterpieces.  (Well, I think they are masterpieces, but usually there are a few versions before perfection.)

Recently, on a tip from a coworker, I discovered "The Great American Baking Show."  By the time I found the show, contestants were entering quarter-finals.  I binge-watched earlier episodes to catch up.  As I watched the series, it occurred to me that I make recipes.  I do alter them, sometimes almost beyond the imagination of the original. I do have to play with the options for substituting gluten-free ingredients. What occurred to me as I watched these "home bakers" is what they have that I don't: a mastery of the techniques that are involved.  As the champion was named on Thursday, I remembered the Julie and Julia project, and I wanted to jump into an apron and start a parallel project trying recipes that would help me learn the techniques of baking.

My invigorated desire to master the techniques of baking is occurring at the time I have three "conflicting" projects going on in my life.  First, I am sorting things that no longer fit with my life.  I now enter my third week of that project, and all I've thrown away are unsolicited make-up gifts and shopping bags. (I have almost put the online version of The Game Called Life to bed, but it has bounced back in review.) If this is really a priority, it seems I should have accomplished more by now. In this sorting project I am supposed to discover where I can work with passion in my encore career.

Second, I have my perpetual "get sugar out of my diet" project, which is more closely aligned with the third project.  Finally, this week I embarked on the addition of a health coaching certificate to my other coaching certifications.  Of course, we started with nutrition, which confirmed getting sugar, as well as refined ingredients that make baked goods, well, baked goods, out of my diet is a priority.

Is it this or that? Am I going to be a baker and go on a whirlwind of learning baking techniques or am I going to be a health coach who shuns the stuff of baked goods?  Oh, do I really have to decide?

I find that the Universe is quite generous in providing us with support to learn spiritual lessons when we are ready to learn them.  The Buddhist "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear" thing comes to mind.  In Rabbi Kula's Yearnings, which I used to escort me into my meditation retreat the first week of January, he explains the importance of getting away from dualities: trying to figure out which thing is true, when in likelihood, there is some truth in both.  My next read was actually a reread of Caroline Myss's The Anatomy of the Spirit.  She makes a similar case with different language.

Last week I heard an NPR interview with a psychologist who talked about our tendency as humans to classify decisions into either/or.  Our basic survival is based on determining, "Is this a fight or flight situation?"  Over many years of working with executives and executive teams, I have found that as soon as they get two options, they want to decide which is the best.  When I ask them about other options, they often come up with several and often better ones than those they started to choose between.

Faced with the conundrum, "Am I going to be a baker and go on a whirlwind of learning baking techniques or am I going to be a health coach who shuns the stuff of baked goods?" I think the answer is "yes."  I am going to try to take the advice of the spiritual teachers and avoid the tendency to force a decision between two options and stay with the ambiguity.  God is, after all, in some way referred to as mystery in most religions.  I'm going to hang with God in the mystery for a bit longer.

My real challenge will be how to stay true to all of my intentions while I linger in the ambiguity.  At the core of our intentions are the ones in our hearts--the things that flip our switches and bring us to life.  To eliminate either my passion for healthy food or the parallel one for baking would be untrue to my heart.  To neglect the cleaning out process would fall short of my intention for this transition period.

I am still wrestling with how to be true to myself in the sugar challenge, since I know enough about baking techniques to know that at least a small amount of sugar is essential to the chemistry of baking.  No sugar, no rising. My experimentation with natural sweeteners has been disappointing at best. Maybe the real challenge here is to grow in consciousness about sugar so that I am in control of how I handle it rather than letting it control me.  Now that is a real mystery to me.

Life is full of "this or that?" puzzles. For those reading this in the U.S. right now, you are aware that there has been a growing political divide in this country for 20 years. The truth is perceived as "my view, beliefs, or side," and the non-truth is "the other's view, beliefs, or side." Staying open and conscious through the dichotomies of life provides the intention muscle and spiritual discipline to grow beyond a simple choice and into a Higher Truth in which there is almost always veracity in both.