January 8, 2026- Bake with grace

Every active perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every active memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Oliver Sacks

We move through life looking for absolutes. We seem to think that life is like baking a cake – that if we simply follow the recipe and pay attention, things will come out right every time. If people around us mess up, we are quick to assume that their intentions were bad. If we mess up, we must not be good enough to do better.

Life has no particular recipe, because we don’t fully understand the ingredients, nor the oven. We spend our entire lives trying to figure them out, but we are limited by our observations and by our assumptions.

As human beings, we are forced to fill in a lot of blanks. We must make our choices without knowing all of the circumstances. We are not omniscient. We don’t observe everything. We don’t accurately remember all that we have observed. We are left to do the best we can with the information we think to be true.

Our habits can provide us with some structure. Our habits give us a bowl with just the right amount of flour. The rest of the world is a bunch of unmarked containers. Some, we have tried before, and we think we remember how they tasted. Some others have never been opened and we may or may not have the courage to sample them.

Life is hard, but it can be delicious. Bake with grace.