The Worry of The Frog, Watching the Water

Dear Tamar,

Food is one of my greatest sources of joy and also an arena for all my issues to play out. My feelings always seem too big for my body to hold. When I am wrought with anxiety, my movements in the kitchen become choppy, haphazard, messy. When I’m hopeless, my cooking becomes grey and flat. When my focus is spinning, I leave rice in the cooker too long and burn sesame seeds I’m trying to toast. How can I learn to cook correctively, instead of in a way that lays my pain bare? Or even—should I?

-The Frog, Watching the Water

Dear Frog,

The first time I noticed time slowing down in the kitchen, I was working the wood-fired oven at Chez Panisse. (Is that true? I’ve become warier by the day of such unequivocal characterizations. How many first times is one permitted…?)

That night stands in sharp relief in my mind, its sounds and smells so near at hand I might be living a double life, both then and now. It was a Saturday night, and I stood at the wood-burning oven, my left hand resting on an oven peel, sighing and feeling—very slightly—bored.

Don’t misunderstand: every varnished wooden table in the restaurant was full. The ticket printer that spit out orders had been erupting ceaselessly since our doors opened at 5. My station was dusted with flour and ash. My wood-fired oven, crackling flames in its back corner, was filled with four pizzas; a little tray of fig-leaf-wrapped sardines waited to replace whichever pizza finished cooking first. The world around me raced and whirled. But for me, awash in wood smoke and the clatter and hum of happy eaters, life inched along glacially.

I described this moment last week to Chef Itamar Srulovich, of the amazing Honey and Co. I compared it to having become Neo from the Matrix, able to dodge live bullets by leaning out of the way. Itamar stared at me and said: “Oh! You get it!” I needled him for sounding so surprised. He doubled down, insisting that he was surprised. What I’d described was the very essence of why anyone would fall in deep, gripping love with cooking. It wasn’t an experience he assumed was universal.

I learned to recognize the feeling as “flow,” or a state in which all of my focus was so fully on what I was doing that time stretched out; there was time enough for anything; each thing that needed doing was done and would be done, and still, excess consciousness remained, ready to be met or teased or touched. I called this feeling “bored” above. That isn’t accurate. It’s more like a complete, fervid readiness.

We don’t talk about what else is happening in a self during “flow”—what is happening to a self ridden with anxiety, or hopelessness, or a lack of focus. I mention it to make a point: We don’t talk about the self during flow because the feeling of time expanding or slowing—or whatever physical metaphor I use to describe this metaphysical phenomenon—is the feeling of the momentary dissolution of self. Neo is no longer Neo when he dodges those bullets. He is the atomic response to the bullets being shot. For a moment, in front of that pizza oven, I was simply the collection of atoms in the space around the pizza (and sardines.)

It all sounds very strange. It also, I imagine, sounds like a relief. I don’t know where the self goes when it dissolves, but it gets a break. It does not have anxiety or hopelessness or distraction. It is at rest. Your dilemma is that you turn to cooking for solace but bring your whole lively troubled self along with youI. It/you never get the break it/you need. Your question is so good: Should I be seeking solace and calm in cooking when my self is unsettled, or is that a betrayal of my self?

Or: that is how I read it. My answer is that you can best honor the self’s anxiety and hopelessness and distraction by letting the self rest. By putting all of your focus on the physical processes in front of you—on the cutting board, on the rice, on the sesame seeds. It’s a strange prescription. You’ll know you’re doing it right when you feel a little bit afraid—a little unsure if it’s safe. It is safe, but you don’t need to know that to begin to let go, for a short time, of the anguish and the anxiety.

Dear cook, you are not a frog and you are not in a pot of water. But your invoking of the old metaphor of a frog being slowly boiled reminded me of another water parable, in which an older fish calls out to younger ones: “Hey, fellas, how’s the water?” And one of the two young fish turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” You don’t need to correct yourself in the kitchen, or continue to mess up as a way of honoring your inner state. You don’t need to try. You just need to turn more and more and more of your mind to the material in front of you, to the feel of an onion on the cutting board, the smell of its teary juice. To the sound of the rice coming to a boil. To the slight pop of a toasted sesame seed. You just need to say out loud, or maybe in your head, if you are self conscious: “This is water. This is water.” It takes all of your body to do this. It takes all of you, except for the bits that need to rest unobserved.