It's a humid morning here, the ground breathing
dampness and fertility after last night’s torrential rain. I headed out early
today for a quick intensive bike ride up a nearby hill. The route takes me
through neighbourhoods lush and green, past morning joggers with their earbuds
in, and labouring people whose work day starts at seven: garbage pick-up
workers, construction crews, nannies.
Now I'm back, having had my airing. My blood is
flowing and brain kicking into gear.
It's about time. I see from the date of my last
post that it's been almost two weeks since I wrote here. Then we had just
passed the full moon. Now we are waning and will soon be into the next lunar
month. It's a big one, for this year the June new moon marks the start of
Ramadan, the month of daytime fasting (no food or drink of any kind) and
nighttime feasting, prayer, and celebration for observant Muslims. Going
without food and drink for the long days here, when sunrise is early and sunset
late, is an exercise in mindfulness I imagine, as well as a difficult physical
feat in the heat.
How do people get work or any other chores
accomplished? I wonder. It's hard enough to settle to a task in normal times,
let alone with a grumbling stomach and low blood sugar. To fast well you have
to be disciplined, and that means getting up early enough to eat well before
dawn so that you are fortified for the long day ahead.
It's interesting to compare the different
approaches to fasting in different religious traditions. For Christians fasting
has usually meant doing without a particular kind of food: meat, or instead all
animal products (no dairy or eggs and no meat). But somehow fish doesn't rank
as animal, and so fish is permitted on fasting days. (Hence the classic
tradition of European restaurants featuring fish on Friday menus, for Friday
was the fasting day for Catholics, still is for some).
I was in Georgia last spring during Lent, the
forty-day fasting period before Easter when all meat and dairy are forbidden to
observant Orthodox Christians. The rule has pushed cooks to invent fasting
versions of favorite foods, such as khachapuri. On fasting days these flatbreads
– normally filled with fresh cheese - are instead stuffed with delicious cooked
beans. Home cooks and bakeries were also making cakes and other treats during
Lent, using alternative non-dairy ingredients such as margarine and alternative
recipes that didn’t call for eggs. That strategy seemed to me to go against the
spirit of fasting. I mean, the cook might have had to be mindful, but the
greedy eaters still were able to have their luscious
cant-tell-it’s-any-different cake even in the middle of Lent.
In Islam, and in Judaism too, fasting means not
eating at all between sunrise and sunset, then breaking the fast with a feast
in the evening. This sounds much more convivial than obeying rules and trying
to work around them for forty days!
I’ve been led
astray by these explorations of different approaches to fasting. Sorry!
What I want to
explore here is the difficulty of getting down to work, into work, focussed on
work, immersed in work… You get my drift.
I find that when I
have a clear succinct to-do list, a series of tasks, a set of must-do’s, then
it’s not too hard to just work my way through them. But when the first job of
the day is to decide what the day’s goals or tasks are, then things can get a
little messy. Distractions abound, there’s no clear necessity to get a
particular task done, and procrastination takes advantage of every opening.
I’m thinking about
all this because of my Persian World book project. (The deadline for delivery
of the manuscript is exactly a year from now: end of June 2015.) Since getting
back from Kurdistan and then the Beard awards in NYC in early May, I have had
six weeks of home time. I had imagined, when I was thinking about the shape of
the year, that I’d use these weeks for work on the book. I have done, but only
piecemeal, testing recipes, writing the occasional story, and researching
history (while also watching history being made in Iraq).
But it was not
until this week that I was finally able to make myself deep-dive back into
extended long-stamina workdays focussed on the book. Suddenly I am deep inside
it, reviewing my notes, writing, and “wearing” it in a full 360-degree way.
What stopped me
from doing this earlier? I think that while there are outside obligations to
others (in my case teaching a food history course once a week for six weeks,
and a few other small bits of writing work) as a partial excuse, there’s
something else going on.
It’s too easy to
stay on the surface of a project, to skate around on it, rather than committing
to being inside it. And that is because it takes serious effort to immerse and
commit. And somehow I failed to put that work in, or perhaps I knew that it
would be wasted, since I’d be pulled back out and into other necessities, so
what was the point?
All of this may
seem like pointless meandering to you. You may be very successful at setting
tasks and then completing them. But for those of you who struggle to shape your
work days effectively, I assume you too have had these experiences I am
describing.
Another piece of
the explanation, something that I console myself with, is that I am mulling
things in my subconscious, putting pieces together, trying to make coherent
sense of the massiveness of my project, and that I shouldn’t feel that nothing
is being accomplished in these weeks of bits-and-pieces work. Hmm
We’ll see. All I
can say now that I am embarked again (the last time was in November-December
after I returned from Iran) is that I am loving the project. It feels rich and
promising, the food is delicious, the issues and geography and history are
fascinating. And above all the human layers with their warmth and distinctive
cultural necessities are so engaging. I just want to roll around in all this
and luxuriate in it, for a good uninterrupted stretch.
If I manage to do
that kind of sustained immersion in the project, I will probably be writing
here less often in the next two months. My first plane ticket in over three
months will be a flight to the west coast in August for the wonderful Grain
Gathering (formerly Kneading Conference West) north of Seattle on August 22 to
24. And after that…well I will need to try to re-immerse for a bit, before
heading out for more travel research.
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