This is a piece about the playful joy of curiosity. If you’d like more of that in your life, sign up for Camp Curiosity. It’s Pay What You Can, Gen X women. I’d love to see you there. We begin on Wednesday, July 17th. One week from today!
My brother once took up a habit that still influences me today.
Back in the late 1990s, I was living in New York City, walking around the upper West Side in all-black clothes. When I returned for Christmas one of those years, I stayed with my brother at his new apartment in Seattle.
Bay window. Old wooden floors. Tiny, creaky kitchen. Check.
Sketches of candles all over the walls.
Wait, what?
I asked him about the quick sketches, some realistic, some quick bursts of color, some somber, some dancing. The edges of the large sheets of paper were frayed from being torn quickly from the sketch pad. It was a wild scene of fire and form, oddly meditative and calming.
He told me that he had started a new habit.
Instead of berating himself that he wasn’t painting regularly or creating great art, he decided to wake up each morning and draw a candle. Just pay attention to what was before him and sketch it, quickly, without too much thought.
Just make something on the page. Every day.
He doesn’t do this anymore. This was only one of the many transitory tiny habits my brother has made throughout his life. Me too.
We’re both fascinated by the tiny changes we can make to create changes we like in our lives.
I think often of those jagged sketches of candles, the beauty in them. The letting go.
We’re all susceptible to becoming bound to our perceptions of who we should be.
If I go too long without writing, I’ll start building a fortress in my mind. The story I tell myself is that I’m crafting a plan, an outline for a book I’ll write someday.
Someday. That word has guided me the wrong way all my life.
When I write little 10-minute sketches of stories, or 2 paragraphs of what could become an essay I will write the next day, I feel liberated. When I write out of an urgency that demands fingers on the keyboard, or pen on the paper, I play.
I write in a rush of gorgeous excitement, in the space between my brain and the paper. I don’t think about page numbers or word counts or how this might play out on social media. Instead, I write. I simply write.
That spontaneous way of writing has led to everything that has happened in my life ever since.
This is the same way my husband likes to put his hands on a sharp knife and a pile of vegetables, waiting to be chopped. This is how he discovers something every time he cooks.
Standing in front of the stove is his meditation spot.
Mine is right here, typing away on this laptop.
This is how we play.
It’s curiosity that drives us forward.
(And if curiosity drives you too, then sign up for Camp Curiosity, darling.)
I also still think about this piece about Rene Redzepi I read in Bon Appetit more than a decade ago.
“So how, I ask him, do I take all this--the multitude of apples, crates of unpeeled chestnuts, the pimply squashes of all sizes, the last pickings of sweet Concord grapes jealously guarded by a battalion of bees--and plan a meal?...
He ticks off a few ideas we can cook: shaved raw zucchini with pesto; steamed spinach flavored with fresh coriander, parsley, mint, basil, sage, and lemon thyme. Some things he tosses into the bag without a plan, just because they appeal to him that afternoon.
Back in my kitchen, we open some beers and Redzepi makes his case for why he'd rather cook with vegetables. "The dimension of flavors you find in roots and fruits and berries and mushrooms," he says, "it's just so much more diverse and exciting than the three or four animals we eat all the time."
What happens when we play with our food, instead of making things according to a meal plan we lay out the week before?
What happens if we tear down the fortress of how we think we should eat and simply get curious about it?
Danny and I both love spending time understanding lemons. And apricots. And the taste of salmon when you combine the two. When you cook them. When you write them.
We’re both drawing a candle every day.
Would you like to play with us?
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