One Learns By Doing

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately.

Usually, this is a bad thing, the sort of thing that leads to self-doubt, self-loathing, and any other hyphenated, negatively-connotated word combination that begins with "self-".

This time, however, it's been rather freeing.  It's probably because the stress of pursuing a real estate license while working full time is now officially off my shoulders.  So a lot of my thinking is now about What's Next.  What Am I Doing Now.

The first thing that jumped to my mind was "You've got all this extra time now, so now is the time to finally re-create yourself.  To finally get skinny.  To finally be perfect."  Hence my head-first plunge into a Very Bad Fattitude.

Well, screw that.  I don't want to be perfect.  To attain perfection, if there is even such a possibility, would simply be the initial event in a lifetime of maintaining the perfection.  And who wants to spend their lifetime doing that?

As you may have noticed, I've stopped writing full-blown recipes.  Yes, I'm still sharing my food ideas, combinations, and obsessions, but I'm not writing step-by-step how-tos anymore.  I might do it every now and then, but for the most part, I won't.

Why?  Because it's not fun.  It's not the point.  It's not how I learned.

I learned by trying.  And failing.  And trying again.

And isn't that pretty much how life works, too?

My culinary idol, Julia Child, would have celebrated her 101st birthday this month (though let's face it, if she were still alive, she'd be crustier than a French baguette by now).  I've always been drawn to Julia's approach to cooking, a no-hold-barred, just do it and by golly have fun the whole time approach.  This approach is also the way I'm learning to live my life; one (not so meticulously recorded) step at a time.

So I found some Julia quotes for you.  I hope you enjoy them.