My Aunt Lorene made the best biscuits on the entire planet. It pains me no end that I will never have those biscuits again because no matter how she tried to train me I could never make them exactly the way she did. She threw flour, Crisco, salt, and milk or water into a bowl and made magic.
Aunt Lorene’s well manicured tiny hands with their blood red nail polish would dig right in, mixing and mashing it all in a brief but hypnotic flurry of flour dust and flying drops of liquid. After washing up, she plopped wads of dough out onto the baking pan with a tablespoon and called them cat head biscuits because they had pointy tips on top. Plop, plop, plop and into the hot oven they went.
When you’re making biscuits more than once a day you don’t have time for rolling out, cutting and reaching for perfection, you have to get food in the oven and on the table as fast as possible. She would say let’s do this fast with a promise to do it better next time. Although there was never any better whether they were done fast or slow they always tasted the same: unbelievably delicious.
The important part here however is even when you’re doing a process like making the same biscuits you’ve made every day for decades and people are waiting to be fed (and complaining that it’s taking some time) once you’ve mixed the ingredients and put them in the oven there is nothing to do but wait.
It’s hard to wait knowing the goodness that’s coming and how fun the process has been to make them and will be to eat them. It’s very hard to wait when you’re so hungry that all you can think about is those hot fluffy biscuits oozing with butter! And yet despite it all, there is nothing to do but sit.
If you keep picking at the biscuits, picking at your projects, picking at yourself, your end results are not gonna taste very good and they’re gonna take even longer to achieve.
This is true for any creative project. There are cycles. Growing a baby, a business or a book. Planning a bank robbery, luring a feral cat toward food or making a batch of kombucha. Painting, planting, and projects of every kind require equal spells of action/rest/action/rest. If it’s time to rest then rest. Binge watch Orphan Black. Check out Karen Brody’s material on Yoga Nidra. Read summer beach novels aka fluff or what a friend of mine used to call “vagina books” which was her unique way of referring to women’s fiction. Crochet, knit or best of all and my personal favorite just nap for as long as you can, as often as you can.
You won’t regret waiting even when it’s a little bit of a struggle to do so. You want those biscuits to be the best they can be, to taste so damn good and to feed your family! If you need help knowing whether it’s time to wait or you are craftily avoiding doing your work in the world schedule a free Discovery Call and let’s explore!
