There is beauty in slowness. I recently ran across the argument that we (as Americans, in particular) don’t value times of slowness and times of do-nothing-ness because they are times lacking in productivity, and for us, lack of productivity = lack of worth. So because I am not actively producing something when I curl in my favorite chair or “succumb” to the feeling of not wanting to read an article or compose a post or imagine a dish, I am being “lazy” or “wasting” my time.

But immediacy, and busyness, and the constant need to be doing something “worthwhile” can be damaging. I have to remind myself of that, especially as I hold in my consciousness the truth that I haven’t posted here in over a month, and mentally wring my hands that I haven’t been motivated to get in the kitchen and photograph my doings or try to imagine a dish that doesn’t already exist in 25 easier, quicker, and cleverer versions than the one I’m just beginning to consider.

This mental wringing has led to two possible “projects” for 2020, both of which I initially leapt upon with great enthusiasm. Yes. This was it. And then, as the first week of the month and then the second passed, and I started to consider grocery lists and recipe structures as well as planning my own scholarship and a sudden spate of meetings and a few necessary jobs on the house and a possible family visit and a handful of get-togethers with friends, they fizzled. And that’s okay.

So I have to remind myself, as I watch another week go by and get yet another (five or six at least) notification(s) from various social media connections to this blog that it’s been a while since I last posted, that slow is okay. Not posting is okay. It’s okay, in a labor of love that this blog is intended to be, if I don’t toss something up there just for the sake of posting. It’s okay to let things mull and slosh around in my brain for a while, deciding what comes next. This is an especially good reminder given the other kind of writing I’m sinking into this month, which is entirely academic: it’s okay if it unrolls slowly.

These truths together – that doing “nothing” is okay, and that slow does not mean lazy – help me see that, at least for a little while, I may need to change directions here, in this little space. This has been for a long time a recipe blog. It has been a place I use to show you what I am cooking in words and in images and provide you with the capability, through a recipe that is usually carefully planned but sometimes, I’ll admit with only a glimmer of shame, approximated, to recreate the dish about which I must wax poetic. But this space began, back in 2008, as a replacement for an old Live Journal that was turning into a meal-planning diary. It was a place for me to talk about food: the food I was growing, the food I was cooking, the food I was consuming and what I thought about it. And that was exciting.

I think, for a little while at least, I’m going to return to that. Instead of fighting myself to create, develop, and perfect a dish that can be photographed beautifully and codified into an easy-to-follow recipe, which is how I’ve felt about this space in the last couple of months, I’m going to take a breath and just… talk about food. It’s a bit of a low-pressure refresh: slow, thought driven instead of schedule-driven, reflective and free.

Let’s see what happens.