Daily bread

My husband is the baker in our family.  He has perfected two different breads, one a traditional kneeded bread and the other what he calls a “sloppy” bread that he has developed and modified from a wet dough that sits and proofs overnight before he adds in flour and lets rise before baking.  Both are delicious still warm from the oven with mounds of butter and honey or as an accompaniment to a hearty soup.

I bring this up because many of us go about our daily approach to life from different angles, the results of which are a kind of perfection.  The ingredients are the same:  the equivalent of flour, water, yeast and salt, and yet how we get there; our path to our outcome can be long or quick, meandering or purposeful.

We are also always tempered by circumstances.  Is the oven on the fritz?  Is it overly humid?  Has the yeast gone stale?  Is the flour high gluten?  Unbleached?  Mistaken for cake flour?  I have found from my own attempts at a daily something that the path to completion is a constant surprise.  This morning is no different.  With too little sleep last night, I adjusted the alarm clock to ring an hour later.  That variable has set in motion a reordering of morning. I write first.  In doing so my energy is different.  My breath less full than the other mornings of the last three weeks.  Even the cat is puzzled as she flits back and forth challenging me to get up off the couch to pay her some attention.

And perhaps that’s the point.  Our routines, become so — and yet we must constantly adapt; not so different than sorting through how to approach an opponent in the ring.  The parameters are the same, a 16 foot ring shared by two bodies in motion, and yet the one may be constantly in a swirl of action with the other acting and reacting to circumstance; relying on the ingredients,  training and conditioning, to figure out how best to proof the self to the best outcome possible.