Beautiful flowers, beautiful friend
Have you ever taken a half baked pie six blocks down the street to have a friend finish baking it for you? I can officially say I can check that off my list of baking disasters. Never have I been so happy that I have helpful friends who also have a professional cupcake kitchen inside their house. Somewhere between work, blogging, making pies for a fundraiser and attending our small group on time ... life got in the way. There I was standing in my kitchen needing to leave in five minutes to make it to the next thing and my pies were about twenty minutes out. It was one of those total flight or fight moments where you are shaking till it is over. However it is those moments that bring out true colors of those you depend on. It gave me one more reason to love my friend for helping me out and my husband for being patient.
The only thing this made me think of was this: had this moment happened with another area of interest for me, like sewing, it might have been a long time before I attempted it again. Yet food is so important to our daily lives, you can get frustrated with cooking but you are going to eat again and chances are you are going to at least re-heat leftovers for yourself. We all are going to at some point get back on the horse.
Food is beautiful like that, the way it makes a common ground, how people can be brought together by food. From Easter lunch with a large family to a crisis that where a friend lends a hand there are always tense moments. One of the best pieces of advice I got when I started to learn to cook and bake more is “be fearless…it is just food!” The second great piece of advice came from a close friend/sister-in-law who said “sometimes you just have to eat the crap!”
Taking photos, taking chances
There is something about just going for it, learning and taking chances and creating something new. Yes, there is that chance you might eat some burnt rice or suffer through a not-that-tasty dish, you might even have to humble yourself and let someone finish your pies for you. This translates to so many areas of my life including blogging. After letting fear hold me back I've jumped in, all or nothing, because the fear of failing was so much less than the fear of not trying. There is always that chance, that in that breakdown you find the beauty of the accomplishment of doing it yourself. The beauty in the breakdown is knowing you have tired.
