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Cooking relaxes me. No matter what’s going on out there, in my day or in the world, if I can stand in my kitchen, assemble a bunch of ingredients, measure them out into the quantities dictated by a recipe, and turn them into food, I feel better. I’ve accomplished something. I’ve created nourishment that sustains life. And I’ve done it on my own terms. It’s one place in my life where I feel a sense of control.
I’ve been cooking a lot these days.
When you live in chaotic, emotionally fraught times, feeling a sense of control can be comforting. When you are being disempowered as a result of those times, it becomes essential for your mental health. The feeling of having power over something, even if it’s only a handful of vegetables and spices, injects you with a soupcon of confidence that can make a huge difference when that feeling is in short supply.
I’m not suggesting that exerting power over something small (and particularly something domestic like cooking) is a replacement for actively pursuing the larger-scale empowerment and rights you’re being denied. We have to fight like hell for that empowerment, those rights. Many people have already been fighting like hell their entire lives, and more and more are joining in.
But that work is a marathon: long, difficult, and, on many days, unrewarding. It is not work that validates you frequently or that offers many benchmarks of your progress. Balancing it with smaller work that fulfills you in a short-term way gives you a sense of having accomplished something, and it will give you more energy to return to that bigger fight.
Addressing the ills of the world is writing a novel. Cooking, or whatever you choose, is writing a haiku.
Both have value. Both add meaning to our lives. They balance one another.
This week, as you are likely already thinking about the big fights, the long slogs, don’t forget to give some time to the tiny corners of your life in which you have total control. Enjoy them. Draw strength from them. And use them to fuel the bigger projects you undertake as we head into the shorter, darker days of fall.
