I’m desperate to not be made desperate by dark days.
I try different methods. I try breathing deeply in the cold air, letting myself feel the cold and saying: This is what cold feels like. I try welcoming winter out loud, alone in my backyard, squatting next to a sage bush flattened by snow, whispering: Welcome.
But, today I realized that nowhere but my kitchen in winter does light do the particular thing it does — expose the shivering outlines of trees in small constant movement against cupboards — grey outlines of cherry boughs and apple branches, moving so subtly that their very movement is dappled.
In my kitchen, I watch the outlines, shaking, shivering, shimmering — as the English priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim” — then I rise and put on the kettle.
This time of day, this time of year, I feel myself hollowed out and anguished. Some of it is early darkness, chiller wind, less living, more dead. It deepens, though, into a sense of my having missed the mark, of certain ideas about myself not bearing out — it might start localized in the short days but quickly becomes systemic. It is a feeling to which I have to pay attention or else I’ll try increasingly desperate measures to escape it.
The day begins to darken just after 4, but because I’m in the kitchen, I already have a cup of hot tea. I see a pile of brown potatoes in need of peeling and remember chicken thighs in need of seasoning. Amid the shadows and the Hopkins, I find an inner spur to peel and season and roast. I can’t ignore that the house is humming with a dozen kinds of fuel — the stove’s gas, the refrigerator’s electricity, my son and his friends just upstairs, their growing hunger and my own, all the allusions that arise when one pays attention to sensations.
I’ve come to lean on the daily mechanics of the kitchen for much-needed meditation, and on my kitchen meditation — if it can be called that — for the energy to cook. I’ve found a strange peace in making close observation of commonplace food, in commonplace meals, that occur in the commonplace of every day.
It’s exactly what makes daily cooking so demanding — the volatility of the materials, metal pans that conduct frighteningly high heat, the perishability of vegetables and meat and milk — that shapes it into such good material for noticing. As long as I get myself to pay attention, there is too much going on in the kitchen world for me to spin off into anxious abstraction.
After a lifetime struggling with clinical depression, I accept that I won’t always feel well adjusted. So I’ve learned — am still learning — to seek intersections of what I must do — in this case, cook and eat — and what I find beautiful, or delightful, what makes life worth living.
If I love its minutiae, my life cannot be as hollow as it sometimes feels; if the material for delight is right here, surrounding me, I haven’t actually failed horribly at finding a rewarding path and place for myself.
There are many things we all have to do: dress, wash, work, eat, sleep. All necessities offer some material for appreciation. But when I turn my observation to the kitchen, with its complex tools and substances, its sights and smells and sounds, its centrality in our lives, I find an elegant solution to two problems: dogged periodic depression, and a lack of energy to cook.
If I devote myself to noticing each day some commonplace kitchen delight, it could shift my inner state from petrifaction to fluid openness — from rigid fear to resilience. I begin to feel grateful to the materials of the kitchen. I could even find myself deciding to do something simple in the kitchen — make tea or mac and cheese or basic pasta or beans — because somewhere in the act I might find an opportunity for the mindful observation on which I now rely.
Here’s an early evening kitchen meditation that requires no cooking (but might at some point result in some.) Find a time when the sun is low and, without self-censure, take an inquisitive inventory of the flotsam beneath your kitchen table. Mine is an elaborate collage. There are two kinds of beans — one huge and dried, used by a three-year-old two weeks ago as a plaything; another small and fresh, from a case we were shelling. There’s a chunk of sourdough bread. There’s a chink off a chestnut, a piece of apple core, some leaves, a coil of thin white thread.
Beneath my table is a topographic model of my family’s life, painted in golden light: the beans and leaves and string that we’ve shelled and tracked in and with which we’ve sewed. It looks, suddenly, too sweet to alter, too poignant to sweep up. Who dropped the bread and decided, absorbed in conversation, to leave it there? I didn’t hear the beans drop, but there they are: bits of experience that slipped past observation.
I find myself, amid such a meditation, marveling instead of mourning. I find myself enchanted by sensory details of the very life I was bemoaning before I urged myself to look closely at the place I find myself day in, day out.
If you begin to hollow out, as I do, with too much early evening pondering of missteps and mistakes, consider joining me in reframing where you look for something good.
It may be that you’ll find it within the daily human necessities of feeding and eating.
It may be that you’ll find what you need to buoy your spirits in the shadows on your kitchen cabinets in winter and the flotsam beneath your kitchen table.
Tamar Adler is a food writer.
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