The Restless Beginning

I also thought it was patient and made no sound when I found that it could be making the sound of bread in the oven.

Until the nearest approach to the extreme majority of my life, I have considered waiting as of some sort of a purgatory: a nihilism, a grating-in-between between something and something. It was one that had to be endured, rushed, or rather evaded.

I had made a sense of urgency, a human, who had already boiled leftovers in the high burner, turning it already into rubber, as well as who needed to look at the oven light at least once every half an hour as though my eyes were going to further speed up the roast, who needed to know my answer, before I could utter a word of the question.

I was in the tyranny of the present and believed that action was better, and that rest was inaction, and foolish inaction. That was my pillow against the hideous barrenness of lazy days, such a mutilated laziness was. Silence was almost a vacuum I was obliged to fill it out with noise, doing, something.

One cold winter afternoon that I was down a-kneeling on the hard tiles in the kitchen and I was toe-to-nose with a bowl of unrisen dough. It was four, and it was a white dead body which was sickly unconcerned with my impatient exasperation.

I was applying the formula of the computer oracle, i.e. the hot water, the yeast which had been experimented scientifically, the flour and sugar which had been weighed carefully. I had done all that would make sure that, life, everything that would make sure that. Yet, the dough just sat.

It was a tough and stupid teacher, with whom I was so ill-equipped in a lesson. The wailing of appliances and dust-specks of sunbeams of the kitchen caused its present-day kitchen to be my nearest school.

The Quiet Teacher

My mother must have had to bear the fruits of my childhood lunacy and her hands had never felt the tongue of flour and water. “Good bread is no addition to them in a hurry,” and I wipe my hands up with my spotted apron.

It was something simple and prosaic, a fact of baking, which I refused early in my life. Yeast needs time. It was not that I had no idea of the metaphor, how it operated.

And now when she saw that bowl of dead, it was of a new note, of a deeper note. She was even not talking only of bread. She was discussing everything that is truly of importance in the slow and gradual process, step by step, of an existence: love, curing, the slow, persevering evolving into what we are supposed to be.

I began to know that bread speaks. It does not struggle its strength, nor shouts its overtures: it cries. It is conversing in the wholesomeness of water, the plasticity of the kneady dough, and the yeasty earthly fragrance which can be made.

Nobody will be capable of hearing it with the ears alone, and comprehending it. You must feel with your fingertips, with your palms, with that thick-headed field of your own heart.

When it was my first experience of putting my knuckles into a mushy piece of dough, I got a shock of recognition. It was alive.

One was sucking and stretching and fighting and submitting. I could feel time, feel as though I were feeling a clock, but not a clock but a living thing, an animal, passing through my fingers, and even to the very centre of the flour.

My pitting of the dough was miraculous. It has been made a tangle, a bush, a disheveled object, to a whole, soft, and strong object. It became willing.

And in that idiotic body altering I visualized my soul. Beat life had beaten me, too, and grief had tortured me, and pleasure beat and cut had beaten and cut me. My network gluten was the scars and strengths. And perhaps, like the case of the dough that lay with the wet cloth, I was still up rising.

The Lesson of Slow

Being an obedient patient is insubordinate in the face of the hawks of the world selling anxiety like air. We are the instant gratifiers: instant coffee, instant gratification, instant communication, instant success. We live in a fast culture in which we relate to efficiency and intelligence.

Bread is an orthodox follower of an even more elderly and backward religion. Nothing about it is instant. You cannot rush it. You cannot command it. You can not beat it into being.

TThe state, the warmth, humidity, and stillness are created only, and the next most significant aspect is to retire. You must surrender control.

And the initial success of the dough beginning to rise and force into the plastic wrap in a doming success, was the one that fell upon me as an epiphany. Waiting is not an absence of waiting. It is an extremely participatory measure.

It is dumb, stubborn faith. You don your part,--you provoke, you strike, you mould, you think,--and in the course of time, this oldest and most mysterious of substances, you leave to time to do its consecrated business. You are made a mate to the invisible.

It is in these in-betweens when neither action nor results are underway that something fundamental happens. It is not merely the yeast, which has its work to do in changing the sugar to air, nor even the strands of gluten as they fall together. Something shifts inside you.

The aggressive and instinctual desire to possess power starts to melt. You get to know how to sacrifice well. You no longer make an effort to make it rise and start and start in a fresh and fresh start, but you begin to pick up the sweet and irresistible beat.

You get to see how certain things in our lives that are the best are attained when we are not around, when we are not looking, when we finally come to a conclusion that we would rather leave it be.

Love as Leaven

It is not an accident that, this very winter, simultaneously, at the same time, my greatest relation was disintegrating, unnoticed by anyone. We had been two, raised together, a perfect, comfortable, wholesome whole.

We were falling now beneath the weight of unfulfilled demands and resentments that were unspoken. We were loving together in a kind of the same way that I had been loving that original piece of loaf, which I had made--brown in hue, and pleasant to look at, the picture of a hearth-side contentment itself.

However, inside, where you cut through the crust, it was heavy and sticky and immature. Bubbles of air were few and small, and the flavour had not yet become perfect.

The most hideous surprise came to me when I understood that I was perceiving love as a recipe. I had used what I believed could make a man happy; say this, do this, shun this conflict. With an eye of agonizing sparingness, I had measured myself against him and had anticipated the ideal, foreseen result.

Love is not a chemical; it is biological. It is a breathing, living ecosystem. It needs space to expand. It must have the freedom of a conducive atmosphere of trust and warmth, yet it must have the space to descend, to shrink, and to rise, more robust and intricate than before.

One night, though, when hollow sulky words flew over my head, banging and moaning neither with tiredness, I went to bed in the kitchen.

I went in there, not in the mood to bake something. I fled after some way of procuring a measure, of remembering what it had been to have patience in my hands, when I could feel so unpatient in my heart.

As I was folding the dough, I pressed and folded the dough and I questioned myself how love should also be folded.

It is not merely of the strokes of the gestures of kneeding, but of the more subtle, repetitious forgiving, comprehending, and mutual silence. There is no use poking and prodding bread till it rises.

To abandon it, to wrap up the stuff, and walk away, leave it to the working of its processes, without your observant fear, is sometimes the most loving thing you may do. Love, perhaps, is also deserving of the moderation reproving.

The Music of Waiting

And there is a sort of--little to be heard--noise there is, a loaf made quite, proven--then some little, sighing, complaint to pressing finger in the flour--then you press it with a thumb. You can tell it by your bones, you cannot hear it by your ears but you can feel it by the thing just under the palm that it is there. You can not find it in a timer. You have been taught to touch it, dumb play between the baker and the baked.

And that, now, is what waiting has turned into to me, neither a race after a finish-line, no, but a talking to, a reassuring, conversation, an ongoing conversation. I wait differently now. I am not on the side waiting with my foot jutting and my vitality on the not coming of something which is not yet arrived. I wait by listening.

I intercept the ballast, the non-verbal expression of the eyes of the folks that I love, non-verbal expression of the other me that is continuable and perhaps eternal in the business of coming together. I also came to know that patience does not mean doing nothing. It is doing the things that it is all that there is that doing the things you have to do anyway.

The work is he in whose occurs the one that takes place in a whisper. Sometimes it is simply the willingness to create a most comfortable, quiet environment to fill the place of suffering of a beloved one without rushing to the solutions.

It can also be a belief in a direction that is you bouncing back since you are already in a season where you are not able to see any further improvement.

And one of the best patient things to do, sometimes, is as simple as taking a bowl wrap, damp towel and wrapping it round a bowl of wrap, turning off the light in the kitchen and going to sleep, with the little faith of the heart, that somewhere in the darkness as you sleep something beautiful and nourishing must have occurred somewhere in the darkness.

The Second Rise

Another bread secret had been given to me by the mother who was the most tolerant and early teacher. She told me that one of the things that a good loaf must possess was the two risings.

The first increase is the bulk fermentation whereby the dough acquires its flavor and its original structure. The second rise, the proving, which follows the moulding of the loaf, however, is what determines what the loaf is going to be like and how strong it will be at one time or another.

This latter, and to wait which gives to the bread its strength to support itself in the heat of the oven, to give it its last form. It is an excellent metaphor of the human soul and now I think that this is just what it is.

The former is our youth, our early difficulties, as we familiarize ourselves with the first principles of patience whenever we are not able to possess all that we desire at first when we desire it.

But something is the second ascending. It follows the general numbing of experience, when we have been hit with something, when we have been disappointed by some failure or frustrated affections, and that has shattered our mould of loving.

At the latter growth, we get to know about resilience. We learn in it that we can be remodelled, that our taste has been sweetened with labour, and that we possess a strength of which we know not either, until we are made to go through the flames.

The pitiful owl-peek look which I gave myself at the age of my younger self peeking into the oven just as fast, who had to pay off all serious conversation, all relations that are tough and too, too early, who was addicted to everything that was immediate, to the present moment...

I am not so proud but very loving. She was not stupid, no education. She would still not be informed that waiting was not an equivalent of time waste. The particular problem was the issue of becoming. They were all proving all the failed, heavy lumps, all the mute pains of heart that seemed to be dissolution, all the months of pure stagnation that seemed to be motion.

They were the labour, which was necessary, which was invisible, which was training me to my own second birth.

The Gift of the Slow

Now, the making of bread has become my weekly sanctuary. This is my communion. While the bread dough rises, I have learned to simply exist within the gift of slow living. I do not scroll through a digital world of curated lives. I do not rush to the next task on my list. I do not plan the week ahead with frantic anxiety.

"I no longer believe that quiet is a waste of time. I feel as though I can finally just be here. Rilke's advice on reconciling with our inner riddles is something I frequently refer back to. I recall copying that into my notebook from college years ago. Though I didn't fully understand it at the time, it felt significant. It simply remained in my memory. I simply knew they were important. I simply knew I enjoyed it. I believe I truly understand what it means now.

It is scholarly adulation devoid of comprehension. I guess we should try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Without ever recognizing it, you could end up living your way into the solution. It was beyond my understanding at the moment. I believed the answers were the prize. I understand now. Because every loaf of bread, every moment of patient waiting, every slow and painful lesson in love has been a tangible demonstration of this truth. The invisible work - the gestation, the fermentation, the proofing - isn’t a prelude to life. It is the very heart of it.

The Last Slice

The bread I pull from my oven these days is never perfect. Some loaves are a little flat. This serves as reminder that the conditions are not always ideal and that I cannot control everything. Sometimes the crumb is too chewy, a testament to my over-handling, my do instead of be I urge. Sometimes the crust is a little darker than I wanted it to be, a beautiful flaw that speaks of the special things of that day.

And in my baking and in my being, I have stopped chasing perfection. The rare, lasting joy is in the process of baking bread. I cherish the unfolding moment of baking and savor the magic of kneading dough and letting it rise while the house fills with the warm promise of yeast. Then, the perfect moment when wishing no one is around, I sliced open a warm loaf of homemade bread and the satisfying crust crackles.

The patience told, the anonymity of losing yourself to something captive is a reward. Then, the bread is a reminder. Healing, love and true growth and change take time. Patience, slow living, and mindful waiting are not passive—they are powerful. Waiting is active, time is a diagnostician and none of the things meant for us, our love, peace, and the person we are becoming are late. They are rising and expanding while we wait.

So I wait, with kneading and with opened heart. The most beautiful and deeper things, the things we require, the things to come do not come due to our demands. They come when the time is perfect.