Always searching for the perfect ‘recipe’
Pancakes as a metaphor for my life
Last Sunday’s pancakes did not work. I like to make pancakes for breakfast on a Sunday, they feel like a special treat and I like to use the extra time I usually have to prepare something different than my usual oat-based brekkie. I love the process of mixing, frying, and flipping, their doughy texture and the way they absorb the flavours of whatever toppings you pile on.
The thing is, I can’t settle on one recipe. I flit between crepe-style pancakes and more American style ones, depending if I want to roll it up with all the gooey goodness inside or if I want a tall stack to slice into. I like to experiment with the batter recipe, branching out with different flours, formulas, and flavours.
I am always searching for the next best recipe. The ‘perfect’ recipe, as if the one I did last week wasn’t good enough and there must be an even better one out there to try. This experimental approach often ends in mixed results and then I feel annoyed that the new recipe didn’t ‘work for me’ and end up abandoning that week’s batch, as happened last week.
Emptying the pan into the bin and sighing as I reached for the substandard back-up breakfast, it occurred to me that this is how I often approach life in general. I feel like I am regularly searching for ‘the thing’ that is perfect, in whatever area of my life it may be. Bear with me with this kitchen-based analogy! Some examples.
On an almost weekly basis I plot a new exercise routine. My husband used to laugh about it, but now refuses to listen when I come to him to describe my new inspiration for exercise. ‘Why can’t you just commit to something and do it?’, he begs. Since my 20s I have tried all sorts: running, spin class, netball, hockey, swimming, Pilates, weights, joined a gym, quit a gym, yoga studios, at-home yoga, and so on. Last month I bought a skipping rope and have only used it once. I am always seeking out the perfect recipe for exercise.
Similarly, I am frequently experimenting with different meditation practices, recently trying out the use of mala beads. The underlying reason for that was wanting to move away from apps, but again, it is symptomatic of me searching for the meditation technique that is going to lead me to the ultimate inner peace, or like it’s going to make me a better version of myself. I have tried mindfulness, vipassana/insight meditation, mantra-based meditation, breathwork, and of course, the mala beads. I can’t settle on the perfect ingredients for my meditation practice (which is likely very anti the point of mediation anyway!).
And then there is infertility. I jest about looking for the perfect recipe in other areas of my life, but the biggest search has been for the solution to our unexplained infertility. For those of us being dealt this card, we’re always looking for the solution. The perfect reproductive recipe that will lead to success. Believe me when I say I have tried it all - and it’s exhausting. Some things have been helpful to a degree, but none have been the recipe that has yet got us the end result.
And so I keep seeking. For the perfect blend of ingredients that will make the recipe to beat all recipes, that will change my life, make me the ‘perfect’ person, or whatever it is that I think will happen once I find this. That goes for pancakes, exercise, meditation, and fertility. I often wonder where this drive comes from. The most obvious place is often the sheer amount of choice we have these days, in everything. This is amazing, but overwhelming. We keep being told by advertising that we need the next best thing, and being fed stories of people who tried ‘the thing’ and it changed their life.
This lifestyle of constant seeking and searching denies that I am already complete as I am. It’s putting the onus on the external, suggesting that I still need someone or something to make me the perfect human and to find the life that I should be living.
The thing is that the perfect recipe for anything is elusive. There are many variables, even in pancake making! There are our own internal variables, depending on how we feel that day - with exercise, sticking to a rigid regime doesn’t allow for natural flexibility to go with how we feel on a given day. With fertility, seeking out the perfect recipe for how to live only led me down the path of a very restrictive life that isn’t sustainable long-term.
In her book ‘Untamed’, Glennon Doyle describes how she reached a point of realising that no-one else knows how she should live her life because no-one else has lived it before. She writes:
“No-one else in the world knows what I should do. No-one has ever lived this life I am attempting to live, with my gifts and challenges and past and people. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they have never been. There is no map. We are all pioneers.”
This is stuck up on the wall so I can attempt to remember it when I am deep in those recipe books on a Sunday morning searching for the perfect pancake recipe. It doesn't exist! So for today, which is Sunday again, I shall use an old mediocre pancake recipe and that shall be just fine.