Candice is on sesshin this week in Vermont. I’m overseeing the construction of a big new office for FreshBooks, and thus couldn’t go myself. That means I’m on my own this week and I have to cook for myself, which isn’t too big a deal but if I’m going to not eat veggie burgers and takeout all week I need to do some planning.
I’ve been sitting on a couple of big “learn to cook” veggie cookbooks for a while, partly because it’s easier to just look up a recipe online on the one day per week when I’m responsible for dinner, and partly because these books are so big I never know where to start in them.
But for this week I picked up The Complete Tassajara Cookbook and am reading the foreword and first chapter right now, and this at the end of the foreword caught my eye:
So I have wanted to explain that work is not just work, something you have to do to get paid, something you do to get it out of the way, but something that is the way: the way to be more intimately involved in life, the way to be more intimately human, awake and alive to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables; the way to connect this world with this life.
[…]
The difference between chore—where you are repeating an activity over and over, while telling your self it is boring—and joy—when you are studying, feeling, sensing the way—is the difference between being alienated and making yourself at home.
Off to make dinner.
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