Cookies
What could possibly be more important than the quality of your own moment-to-moment experience? The cookies you bake are one thing—the quality of experience you had while baking them is another.
What could possibly be more important than the quality of your own moment-to-moment experience?
I’m grateful to have recently resumed the structure and rhythm of the life I designed for myself, after more than a year of being incapacitated. Being treated for colon cancer provided a lot of time for reflection. Despite the wild fluctuations in my cognitive capacity, one thing became increasingly clear over time: Things went a lot better for me when I was able to focus on facilitating a high-quality experience for myself.
I don’t mean cultivating a positive mindset or striving to manifest wellness, although these things can be significant components of a high-quality experience. I mean being attentive to and engaged in my experiences as they unfolded, whether they were pleasant or unpleasant.
My course of treatment for colon cancer was a long-term project. I knew that there was nothing I could do to speed it up, and that all of the things I would greatly prefer to be doing with my life would have to wait. There was nothing for me to do other than make the most of it, and I found that the best I could do was to become very observant of all the things that were happening around me and inside of me. To experienced meditators, this probably sounds like centering my treatment as the object of my meditative practice. It’s not wrong to describe it that way. But I think a better way to describe it would be that having fully accepted that there was nothing I could do to control or expedite the outcome of my treatment, the only thing I could do was experience it, while noticing the quality of my experiences as they unfolded.
I am ecstatic with the overall outcome, now that I am cancer-free and doing all of the things I enjoy! Those things now include baking lots of cookies. I’ve developed quite a sweet tooth now that I no longer drink much alcohol. Thanks to recipes I found on Modern Honey, I’m getting really good at making Levain Bakery knock-offs. It’s tempting to zone out when you’re doing something you do frequently enough that muscle memory kicks in early, but I find that it’s a lot more interesting to pay attention to the quality of your experience along the way.
So rather than chemotherapy, I’m going to use the comparatively drama-free example of cookie baking to explain what I mean about facilitating a high-quality experience for yourself, whatever outcome you are pursuing.
Say that you’ve decided it's time to bake some cookies. You have a solid recipe, quality ingredients, and enough expertise to guarantee that the cookies will come out delicious and beautiful, regardless of the quality of the experience you have while baking them. For the purpose of this thought experiment, the cookies are the outcome, while your thoughts, feelings, and sensations comprise your experience while baking them. In other words, the outcome is a given, i.e. delicious beautiful cookies, while your experience is what varies. It can vary considerably.
– If it’s a recipe you’ve never baked before, you could be feeling nervous and doubtful, especially if the recipe involves methods and ingredients that differ significantly from the last time you baked cookies. Your expertise enables you to execute the recipe with precision, but your experience is one of second-guessing yourself along the way, right up until the moment that your perfect cookies come out of the oven.
– Having experienced success with the new cookie recipe, you might be feeling confident and excited the next time you bake them. Your experience this time is comparatively buoyant, feeling proud of your expertise while you happily anticipate eating the delicious cookies that you yourself baked, and sharing them with your family and friends.
– Your cookies are now so consistently delightful that you decide to bake some for a really cool person you’re about to see for a second date. You really hope they’ll like them, so this time you’re experiencing a sense of butterflies in your stomach, accompanied by fantasies in your mind about the two of you enjoying the cookies together.
– A friend who shares your love of cannabis visits from out of town, and you decide to bake a magic variant of the cookie. You have a magical experience together. A purely theoretical scenario, of course.
In all four scenarios, the cookies—the outcome—are essentially the same. It was your experience of baking them that differed.
Alas, the delicious cookies will all be gone very soon. So I would argue that it is your experience of baking them that matters for you in the moment, and will motivate and resonate through all of your future adventures in cookie-baking.
If you follow my blog(s), there's a good chance that you’re a singer and/or a voice teacher, and you can probably guess where I’m going with this: When you sing, when you take a voice lesson, when you teach a voice lesson, whenever you practice, rehearse, or perform, what matters most is the quality of the experience you are having.
I am not saying that the outcome doesn’t matter. I wouldn't enjoy baking cookies nearly as much if the cookies sucked, or if I never got to eat them, or to see other people enjoying them. The outcome of your singing practice matters a great deal, not the least because longing for a particular outcome—a new skill set, a stellar performance, a successful audition—was likely part of your motivation to sing in the first place!
What I am saying is that the quality of experience you enjoy through your singing practice matters even more than these outcomes, not the least because a high-quality experience of your singing practice will also likely lead to the best outcomes you could desire.
I’ll be talking more about that in my next post. Going forward, I am aiming to publish every Monday, with the possibility of additional posts in between. I hope you will subscribe and participate in the conversation!
