On My Mind

Dancing in the Kitchen

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This year, for the first time ever, I am not spending the summer with my family. In the past, much of this summertime has seen me with my mum playing together in the kitchen, but, unfortunately this cannot be. So for the moment, I’ve been sharing meals with friends and reflecting on times past.

I’ve written many times that if love is a verb, love requires action. This means behaving in ways that give love. We can show love in many ways, such as holding those who need holding, listening to those who are speaking, helping when help is needed, and giving of our time. Another way to show love, I deeply believe, is through cooking. A few years ago, my mum sewed me an apron embroidered with the words, “Love people. Cook them tasty food.” I think that sums it up.

In terms of cooking, there are two ways to show love: preparing food for others and preparing food with others.

In preparing food for others, the acts of chopping, slicing, dicing, washing, peeling, and whisking (to highlight just the tip of the iceberg) are not accidental – all are intentional. These acts require us to consider others and are the visible evidence of a desire to nourish, which is an act of care. Care in this context is a way to love.

Cooking for others may not involve the seeking of reciprocity. We prepare food that we think others will enjoy, and not with the purpose of raising ourselves in their eyes. So, when we sometimes cook for others in order to impress them, that is not an act of love. Preparing a meal for those in need, however, whether due to the demands that a joyous arrival of a newborn baby or the sorrow of a loss may bring, is something we do for those we care about – for those we love.

In such circumstances, when I cook for others out of love, my favorite meal to prepare is a hearty soup. (Admittedly, this is challenging in the tropics and I have modified my approach.) Soup is a meal that warms from the inside out and is filling, healthy, and tasty. It is simple to enjoy with no more than pepper and bread, and unpretentious with ingredients that are easy to find. There is love stirred into the soup pot.

In addition to showing love in the preparation of food for others, there is also cooking with others. When done with love, this can be analogous to an indoor version of running through the sprinkler on a hot day. It can be glorious or it can be a complete disaster (think thunderstorms and mud flung into eyes) but either way, if it is done with love, it ends in smiles and laughter.

Cooking with others is joyful and spirited. It is the creative interplay of working together, a fluid dynamic that involves trust and tolerance of another person. As my mum has said, “We dance the kitchen dance really well.” And yet, sometimes we get in each other’s way. This is when we take a step back and respect each other’s space, and this requires a significant degree of humility on our part, a willingness to simply let the other person be. We welcome their playfulness, their mistakes, and their laughter – because we do the same.

The kitchen dance, as I know it, is what I think walking hand in hand through the world might look like. It is beautiful and intricate in parts, yet it also requires the discipline to take on the responsibility that it brings. It is not simply preparing food but also caring for all parts of the journey; the sharpening and honing of knives, the clearing of counters, the washing of dishes, and the scrubbing of pots and pans, and finally, the clearing of the table. Together. Us. Rejoicing, frolicking.

A word of warning, however. It is important to recognise that there is a difference between two people working in a kitchen and combining food, and two people dancing in the kitchen and creating food. There is a synthesis of senses in the latter that may not exist in the former. There is a give-and-take between us as texture, taste, scent, and sight of the elements are explored. What I do now will influence the choices you make later. We bounce off and augment each other while incorporating individual creativity. Your taste and my taste guide the next element, the next move. We share as we explore, and in doing so laugh and love.

Playing in this way has led me to compose food that one would never find in recipe books. And in doing so I have found that not all of them merit repeating. But that isn’t what is important. What is meaningful, is that I have played with others in the kitchen and shared in the love that this brings. I will continue to cultivate and cherish those times and urge you and your loved ones to do the same.

Jean Talon Market – Montreal, Quebec
On My Mind

Back When We Had Souls

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I’m not sure if souls exist. I used to know for sure, I know I did, but now I don’t think I believe in souls anymore. As we all do, I’ve drifted from the pretty imagery of childhood stories into a world in which souls do not make rational sense.

And yet.

And yet.

I met a person who, if souls do exist, I would have to say has a soul. The word came into my head one day, suddenly and unbidden, but I knew it was right. I looked at this person across the room and sensed a soul. I knew this in the way that we know it’s going to rain when the sky grows dark and the wind changes. It was immediate and obvious and it frightened me. 

As adults, we live by routines and patterns, by socially accepted and endorsed ways of interacting with one another. We go to work, to meetings, out for drinks, out for meals. We entertain ourselves and each other. We pass the time. We have ‘responsibilities’.

But once upon a time, before all of that, we were children. We laughed and played and made up stories. We turned sticks into airplanes and we flew. We put on wigs and became witches. The sandbox became quicksand and the neighbor’s dog was a predatory dinosaur. In our fantasies, our younger siblings were the pets and our parents came from a different planet. We threw balls of fire and some of us got burned, but still we kept throwing. We claimed the swings as our boundaries and let our friends claim the tree line as theirs. Jumping from the roof with an umbrella was faith that, just like Mary Poppins, we could fly.

As children, we believed in magic. We believed that what we wished for could be, and we dared to make it so. In the eyes of a child, the child that I was, souls were possible because everything was possible.

It is in adulthood that we forget about magic. Instead we have practical, everyday worries. We laugh less often and we forget how to play. We’re too important and busy for that. We’re too concerned with the things we have learned that ‘matter’. We make sure to meet all our basic needs, to pursue and court relationships that allow us to belong to different groups, and to elevate our status to the levels that we believe we are entitled to.

We know that we have to get promoted before we can afford the mortgage on the house, and we have to do it soon because there are already three wedding invitations and one birth announcement on the fridge. Everyone else is ‘moving forward’, so what are we waiting for?

And so, magic is left behind. We forget the spells and potions, we forget the carefully delineated safe zones of tag, and we forget the glee of tearing barefoot across the grass yelling as loudly as we can. We increasingly channel our time to the pursuit of ‘personal progress’ and leave behind that was once so pure and central to who we were. We stop playing, and we stop being.

It is here, I think, that we lose the idea of souls.

As adults, we stop pretending and stop believing in things we cannot see. Looking beyond our adult boundaries into the joyfully cultivated worlds of children is a chore. And so souls, which are intangible, cease to exist.

Such a transformation, one which takes the imagination and supplants it with the material goals brought to us by ‘logic’ and ‘reason’, robs us not only of the existence of souls but of all those other beliefs that children are made of. Words which carried hopes and dreams are now said out of habit, if at all.

And so the progression through life’s journey continues and the price is the loss of the soul that made us who we were.

But such is the way of tacit acceptance of change. We do not recognise that this is what we are doing. We don’t notice the gradual shifts and how these lead us away from one world and into another.  

Once, we were pirates searching for buried treasure that we knew we would never find. The joy then was in the adventure of solving the clues. 

But as time passed, we imperceptibly became preoccupied with the treasure; the joy of adventure got lost and our souls vanished.

But what if?  

What if souls do not disappear, but are simply masked by the habits we develop, by the actions we mimic, by the words we pull together to intellectualise our actions? What if we suspend who we have become, if only for a little while, and simply look? And what if another was to do the same?

I looked across that room and without warning, without reason, I remembered. 

Once upon a time I was a child and I believed in magic. Back when we played pretend. Back when we trusted in our newest inventions. Back when finding all the pieces to build the perfect snowman was as much fun as playing in the snow.

Once upon a time I was a child and I knew we each had a soul. 

And it frightened me that I had forgotten.

Milford Sound, New Zealand – January 2019
Singapore

Dancing in the Rain

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I haven’t spent much time in Singapore during the start of the Southwest Monsoon season, which lasts from June to September. I’m used to the hour or two of afternoon rains that characterises the new school year in August, but half a morning of pouring rain is a new experience. So is half a morning of pouring rain followed by an evening of more rain.

While I won’t be climbing rocks outdoors any time soon and while the rain has put a literal damper on morning bike rides, there are some new features to life here that I’m quite enjoying. It feels cozy, for once, which is something we rarely experience in the tropics. It’s breezy and (comparatively) cool both indoors and out; I’ve made soups and curries for dinner and I’ve been glad for their warmth.

Geylang in the rain – September 2017

When I first moved to Malaysia six years ago I learned to enjoy the rain. Where I come from, rain is cold. Rain in the tropics is not. The water is warm, the air is cool, and it’s a welcome refresher for the day. Granted, getting soaked on the way home from work is inconvenient (although getting soaked on the way to work is more inconvenient) but it’s so much fun at those times to feel like a kid again. You’re wet. Very wet. So you might as well hop off the bike, settle it safely against a wall or building, and dance in the rain.

This is what I have tried to keep in mind now that we’re in the strangest period of summer school holidays that I have ever experienced. Normally, summer for me is spent travelling between family members, catching up with friends, enjoying early morning runs on the nearby canal, and taking a complete break from my normal environment. But this year, we can’t do that. And so we adapt.

Singapore started its reopening a week ago and I have been so glad to see people out and about, to reunite with friends, and to feel my body move at the climbing gym. It has given me time to reflect on the experience of living here and what this place has to offer. And I’m not talking about museums (still closed) or fancy bars (some still closed). I’m talking about hot pot for dinner at a friend’s house and going down the street for a local coffee at a hawker stall. I’m talking about my favorite place in town to watch the world go by and the renewed joy of gathering at home in small groups. Simple things. Things that I missed when they went away.

Experiencing the small joys of an open world, although a small one right now, is what this summer is about. It might not be what I’d planned or what I’d wanted, but I am glad to have this time for what it is.

It might be raining, and that’s all the more reason to dance.

Potong Pasir in the rain – June 2018

On loving, learning, and living