Lessons I Need to Learn More Than Once

It’s a quiet Sunday morning, five batches of granola lined up in a pre-dawn baking marathon (lemon blueberry tahini, if you just asked) as we prep for another busy double market three-day weekend. Tink is kittening around, having found a dried blueberry that escaped one of the bags and landed within paw’s reach. To a feline foundling, anything is a toy. I need to borrow that wisdom the next time I think I’m bored and an opportunity presents itself.

In the morning calm, I’m thinking back to a moment I had during lunch last Tuesday at the small round table in my office and it’s stayed with me, gaining momentum these past several days. A week prior I’d made an overlarge pot of sausage kale soup (we just can’t cook for two) and it was sublime. Chicken sausage wrapped around tart apple bits and smoked gouda, kale grown locally and the last of this year’s crop on the final day of the outdoor farmers market, pride of a produce vendor just behind our stall in the Grater’s Ice Cream Parlor parking lot. In a rich tomato broth dotted with corn cut straight from the cob and flash-frozen, chunks of organic carrots and pinky-sized green beans, it was a meal for the gods. We paired it with roasted banana squash one night, turkey-and-cheese melts the next and ended up freezing the rest, a white flag waved over the landscape of potential meal monotony. I stopped counting at four containers stacked on the top shelf of the old Montgomery freezer we bought at farm auction some twenty years ago. Not knowing what the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday would yield by way of leftovers, Patrick and I dedicated ourselves to clearing a patch in both the fridge and that freezer. We feel it’s just as important to prepare for abundance as it is for disaster and lean times.

So there I am at work, a repurposed black carryout container before me, steam rising from its thawed and reheated contents and I’m digging in, Downton Abbey cued up on the Amazon app for a little “lunch and a show” entertainment. I’m making my way through and realize I’ve pushed the chunks of sausage aside, saving them for last while I spoon up the humble and colorful vegetables in some attempt toward delayed soup gratification. I performed the exact same ritual as a child with my mom’s vegetable and meatball soup (the meatballs were tiny, barely an inch around, and sparse in the bowl as she masterfully stretched a pound of ground beef to feed seven people, five of them youngsters, a flock of baby birds with our mouths open nearly constantly) and it’s quite simple—those little meatballs were delicious and I wanted to end the meal on a high note by eating as many as the ladle had given me, putting an exclamation point on the whole proceedings. Mom would smile when she observed this, having just been thanked and praised for her cooking skills as only an eight-year-old can do.

Fast forward to a workday lunch, mom on the Other Side, perhaps still smiling and me pausing for a moment to contemplate how I carried that eating ritual around with me all this time. Did the sausage taste even better for the waiting? Were the vegetables some culinary second-class ingredient that I needed to muscle through? Was I overthinking the entire experience and would do better to turn my attention back to the family Crawley? “No” to the first two and an all-caps bold font “yes” to the last.

But it did get me wondering about the unexamined rules in my life, where I learned them and how many I’ve tried to unlearn over the years as their usefulness wore thin and irrelevant. I turned off Downton Abbey and reached for my notebook and pen, letting a small but persistent carpe diem moment wash over me. Each one tied to a back story, a period of growth and self-reckoning, fodder for future reflections…

What am I waiting for? Use the good linens and table service now.

Let others go first.

You’re more than the sum of your scars.

Anything resisted persists. Don’t resist resistance.

You wouldn’t worry so much what others thought of you if you realized…they didn’t.

Remember to breathe.

Do something that your future self will thank you for.

Later never comes.

People can change their minds. They often do. And you’re people too.

I’m curious, dear reader and I hope not impertinent when I ask you what lessons you’ve needed to learn more than once? If you’re even a shred like me, you’ll notice that some new encounter, conversation, life-changing moment will carry forward something familiar in its hands, asking you to stop a moment and reconsider what you think you know and repack your luggage differently for the next leg of the trip. What have you left behind and what remains in your toolkit, worn and well-used but also quite sturdy for the tasks ahead?

All this from a bowl of soup.