Biscuits and Deadlines

May 14, 2022 12:01 pm

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If Carb City were a place, I'd live there. And if Carb City had a mayor, well. It would be me.

As this newsletter hits your inbox, know that I'll be hosting my second brunch in as many weekends. Am I good host? Not particularly. Do I have enough silverware to accommodate all the people who will be there? Not even.

(Side note: Why do we have like 74 butter knives and like 3.61 forks? It's nonsense. Where did the forks wander off to, and who could possibly consume the amount of butter that would necessitate 74 butter knives?)

Anyway, brunch is a delight, even if the mere thought of a mimosa leaves me with a migraine and a 3-day hangover. But if you see this on Saturday morning, say a prayer or light a candle for me. I'm making biscuits and I'm not great with breads. Oklahoma is humid with an absurd amount of naturally-occurring yeast in the air, so doughs are none too pleased with this place or my tender kneadings.

(I say all that, but I'm surrounded by tons of perfectly capable biscuit bakers. Please let me wallow in my bready incompetence.)

Anyway, this reasonable facsimile of domestic, homemaker bliss is brought to you by a cozy realization I had the other day.

Also, please know that when I say "the other day," it's any time between yesterday and the day I was born. So, like, yeah. This was a recent epiphany in that it happened in the last year or so, but like, I could not tell you when.

Dates are for historians. Big-picture notions are for the mayor of Carb City.

I get caught up in the idea of where I'm supposed to be. It's something I've done my whole life, and I've functionally lost decades of my life to the notion that I'm just working toward a goal that I'll get to someday, and when I get there, I'll know.

But when you're always looking forward, you're never really present. And while looking forward to how good things are gonna be someday is crucial to actually building the life you want--seriously, people who can envision their future tend to be more successful at goals than those who can't--it can also be detrimental to your enjoyment of your current circumstances.

It may frustrate me that when I hit one deadline, there are at least four more on the calendar waiting for me. But this is the life I wanted and actively worked for back in the day.

I may be a fair-to-middling host, but having a space where we could invite others to come hang out was a big goal Chris and I had before we moved to our current house.

I've been in the habit of looking forward to the time when I get where I want to be that I kind of didn't notice that, in many respects, I'm there.

The other day (this other day is much closer in time to the present than the aforementioned other day) in the Create Your Purpose Collective, I gave a tarot reading to the recent CYP Academy graduates. I pulled the X of Cups, and in the context of the reading, it was a reminder that happily ever after is a journey, not a destination.

If you keep waiting until you get to the end of the story, you're going to miss all the little details that make the story worth reading (or writing) in the first place. So while I may lament that I have more deadlines than biscuits, it's where I'm supposed to be right now, and I'm going to try to enjoy every biscuit baked today.

Even if they turn out like golden brown hockey pucks.

Which they probably will.

Why did I decide to make biscuits?

Donuts would never betray me like this.

Please pray that my guests get so sloshed on mimosas that they don't even notice.

Amen.