28 Sep The Possibility in Everything
As I inched along in the drive-through coffee line, I counted 133 partially written blog entries in my drafts email folder.
I was not happy to realize I had this many abandoned stories; musings started and left incomplete for one reason or another. In some, I couldn’t quite figure out the takeaway message I wanted to tie to a particular event. Other times I knew where I wanted to go but the words felt clunky and I couldn’t seem to get them quite right. There were others where my writing trailed off mid-sentence as if I had been interrupted, perhaps to answer a phone call or pick up the girls from school.
With the coffee cups snugly in their cardboard carrier, I made my way to my neighbor’s house where the girls had been happily playing with a group of friends all afternoon. She greeted me with a warm smile, wiping her hands on a dish towel as she welcomed me in. Her home smelled delightful, saturated with the comforting aroma of freshly baked bread.
As the girls completed their Lego project, my neighbor and I sipped coffee and shared stories about our day at her cozy kitchen table. She is an enthusiastic baker and told me about a bread recipe she had tried earlier in the week that remained a soggy blob in the oven despite hours of baking. She laughed, saying it was meant for a teacher gift and she ended up giving the teacher a gift card to Amazon instead. I told her about the staggering number of unfinished writings I had discovered in my email drafts folder. I could hear the disappointment in my own voice as I vented about the wasted time and wasted words that had never turned into something worth sharing.
Suddenly, a series of beeps filled the air, prompting her to rise from her chair and peer into the oven. Satisfied with the golden-brown crust, she carefully took out the pan and set it on the counter to cool.
“You know,” she began slowly, returning to our conversation, “Sometimes I experiment with new recipes like I did this week, or reattempt something I’ve made before, only to have it not turn out as planned. But in those moments, I find comfort knowing that every time I bake, my kitchen becomes home to new wild yeasts. And that wild yeast floats around and helps the next loaf of bread I make taste even better.”
She cut a thick slice of the freshly baked bread and topped it with a swirl of creamy butter. As she set it down in front of me, she said, “I don’t think the loaves that fail are wasted. They make the next loaf better. And I don’t think your abandoned writings are wasted. They make the next words better.”
I left her house with my stomach full and my heart comforted and cheered about the possibility in everything.