Baking your makings

Pick up hard to go wrong projects as a beginner and do them with sincerity. The result is always motivating to do more. This is the lesson I learnt after baking my first apple pie yesterday. I've always loved apple pies and have been wanting to get into baking for long. No expectations on this one but it turned out rather good, so am gonna bake more.

This is also something that I learnt making my first film Modo De Vida: A Goan Sketchbook. Keeping the premise simple I jumped into it and explored all I could with my current abilities. When the only goal is to finish the film, you finish the film. No expectations from here too but as an exercise I sent it to a few festivals and am really happy with the outcome. So, of course, am making more.

Success and failures are a scam. They are something only to be delved on by the non-maker. A maker knows the emptiness in successes and the abundance in failures.

Individualistic collectives

Three sisters farming is an indigenous method of farming that allows each crop to flourish through interdependence. Traditionally the bean, the corn and the squash are planted together. In her lovely book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin wall Kimmerer points:

“It’s tempting to imagine that these three (the three sisters) are deliberate in working together, and perhaps they are. But the beauty of the partnership is that each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as it happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole.”

For this to happen each of the sisters need to know what it is they specialize in and also to know that they need not be like each other or compete for the same resources. As with our monoculture farming and so with our monoculture education, all derived out of the industrialization of objects and of minds we’ve lost our individuality and the belief in our ‘specific’ way of being. Individuals that are different from one another, thriving with each other, while at the same time working towards their own goals is a fact seldom heard of. But for a collective to thrive there is indeed a necessity to understand one’s own needs and stand behind it first and foremost to be of use to the larger group. We need to deeply understand and take what we need and give what is needed by the other for the collective to thrive together.

Showing up 80% prepared

It sounds counter-intuitive. Were’nt we always told to show up 100% ready for everything that we are dealing?

But the point is when you try to get a subjective measure exactly right and give your fullest, its likely that you will be disappointed. Trying to reach perfection, you’re mostly more than a 100% ready, which is to say about 120% or 130% work of what you would actually need. You’ve done your best and you’ve overflowed the mark that you needed and now you are sure the outcome will be desirable.…and when it doesn’t, unfortunately, you go in a shock and recoil. Add to that, since you are overworked you have lesser bandwidth to deal with any new direction, you are exhausted.

When you show up 80% prepared, you well know that you’re not trying to get it exactly right. If things don’t go as per plan, you’re prepared. You have the bandwidth to listen to what is not working in the moment, absorb it and to change directions.

Getting anything exactly right always depends on multiple factors apart from your efforts, showing up 80% prepared acknowledges that.