My dad didn’t wanna get stuck in the mud with boring habits that’d end up stultifying his mental growth. “Don’t get stuck in a rut” was one of his mottos, safe to say. He built habits to counter habit formation, which is recursive or paradoxical or one of those, but seemed to work pretty well. He benefitted from internalizing his own counter-culture.
I’m doing something similar around domestic habits, cooking in particular, given my long term interest in “home ec” as a topic. I’m letting an experienced Mexican lady on YouTube re-educate me regarding how to cook such basics as eggs and rice.
I realize a lot of us barely cook at all and I’ve gone through chapters in my life where I did not, much. For example in the Philippines we had a skillful live-in cook, Victoria, assisted by Flora. They knew their way around a kitchen. Mom could focus on her activism. Dad could focus on planning and teaching. I could occasionally go into the kitchen and proclaim (not too bratily I hope) that I wanted to ad lib a cookie recipe, and they’d help me, and do most of the cleanup.
At the university, later, all meals were provided, until…
…Until I joined a “food coop” in my junior year at Princeton (and stuck with it through my senior year as well). What’s that?
I don’t think my terminology paints the picture: we all cooked for each other as a group, taking turns, and we also procured our own food using a university allotted budget, I think is how it worked. The money most tuition-payers used on a meal plan, we used on ourselves. So I’d often be on a team of three, say, cooking for twenty or however many sat around the big dining table that day, at 2 Dickinson Street.
So I had some background in cooking for more than (a) myself or (b) a nuclear family (the model for a lotta Home Ec classes back in the day), when, fast forward, I started working with Food Not Bombs.
At FNB, already running smoothly when my household joined, I didn’t rush to the forefront of the cooking squads, meaning I was happy to cut vegetables and do other food prep, leaving the menu to the foodies higher up. Indeed, my main work was not in the kitchen at all, but was about riding a bicycle and pulling trailers, sometimes two, piled with fresh organic produce. Or later I might haul the readied food to the serving site: Colonel Summers Park in SE Portland.
FNB, if you’re not familiar, is designed around a manual (picture a 3-ring binder) of best practices, but how it’s implemented locally depends on who shows up to run the show. Our Portland chapter was centered around young people riding bicycles. I was one of the older participants, if not the oldest. My house was also a logistical hub for parking trailers and storing foods. My housemates were likewise organizers. I even got my Quaker meeting involved, as a cooking site, an alternative to St. David of Wales, which had a bigger (but more likely booked) kitchen.
So that’s a lot about “fooding” (a Himalayan term, as in “fooding and lodging”), however my main point, back to my dad, is staying limber in the habits department. Small seemingly inconsequential changes entails a willingness to stay flexible, meaning adaptable, oft required at a larger level.
Maybe you’re the CEO of a large firm. Yet you’re willing to relearn cooking from a Mexican lady. Maybe that means you’ll also be willing to keep relearning your main job. Dad was a planner. Planning is not a settled science.
In the Active Inference realm, we talk a lot about “free energy”, a variable, and too much of it signals the breakdown of something stable, and its search for a new home (sustainable framework). You could call that a crisis. But running a trickle of free energy all the time, sustaining your own internal counter-culture, by always waging a small scale revolution against small stakes (but ingrained) habits, is going to help your firm survive through the coming thick and thin. That’s the PR anyway. YMMV.
This morning I’m gonna do fried eggs a different way, which includes bringing them up to room temperature, using lard and a little water (next to, not on, the egg), and covering them while they cook. Closer to steaming than frying. I’ve already changed the way I cook rice.
Experimenting with new ways doesn’t always mean losing one’s ability to go with the old ways. Sometimes it does. Sometimes there’s an “I’ll never look back” aspect, where you might theoretically go back, but why? Other times it’s a matter of adding to one’s repertoire. You’ve never played jazz guitar before, only classical. Now you can play both, or, in my case, I stick with neither (life is short).
