When you reach your mid-twenties and
are still feeling your way toward making your passions into a career,
the most common question you receive on any given day from any given
stranger (or family member) is: “So what do you want to do
with your life?”
It is a question infallibly asked in a
crumb-scattered tone and always followed with a readily disappointed
smile.
Usually you pull together a
semi-coherent response from the shreds of clarity spinning through
the rich Silicon Valley of your brain's complex path and manage to
put forth a socially acceptable response. Some dulled, calmed,
sedated version of what you mean.
But I'm almost twenty-five. I want to
begin to respond honestly. And by honestly I mean, I want to look my
questioner square in the eye and reply:
“I plan to be more like toast.”
Sadly, people aren't well enough
acquainted with toast to allow for this being a passable response.
It's always this way in the world: to be given a chance at being
taken seriously we must respond with the things people will
understand; wanting to be more like toast isn't one of them.
But being more like toast is, to me, a
life's work. To be reliable and well-loved. Trustworthy. Life-giving.
Nourishing. I want the experiences and relationships of my life to
flavor me like gem-tone jams and jellies. The serious business
sliding on smooth like peanut butter, the hilarious moments scattered
over-top like sliced strawberries or confetti sprinkles. I want to be
versatile. I want to be bruschetta one night and an open-faced
sandwich another. I want to be dipped in flavored oil here and spread
with herbed goat cheese there. I want passion to soften me like dark
chocolate heated then drizzled with olive oil – a sprinkle of fleur
de sel to draw out the depth of the moment, to savor forever.
I want to taste like home. I want to
sustain and to comfort. I want kindness and charity to pour through
me like butter melting through the golden weave of a perfectly
toasted slice of sourdough. I want to enter a room and be known for
who I am: to be the same person every time; able to adapt to the
nuances of a rich life without once losing my essence.
For toast, at it's heart, is toast.
You may fix your toast differently each
morning, but you know that it is still toast and there's a homely
delight in the knowledge. You may use a different loaf of
bread...cycling through the loving names we give to all the varieties
of leavened magic: rye, focaccia, whole-grain, chapati, sourdough,
brioche, pumpernickel. I'm especially fond of pumpernickel – not
the bread, just the name. The whimsical, devil-may-care word,
pumpernickel. I want to care very little or not at all if I
have a funny label or if some people don't find me to their taste. I
want to be a person other people come to when they need help or a
hug. I want to be what my children beg of me when we're all still
half asleep on a rainy Saturday morning. On days of heartbreak or
illness or sadness, I want to be “cimma-nin toast.” I don't want
to be exotic and temporary and flash-in-the-pan. I want to be...I
don't know...wholesome, established, genuine. I want to be the
Velveteen Rabbit of women, gaining status as something real through
giving myself for others. It isn't a sexy ideal. It isn't glamorous.
It isn't alluring, but let's see what has lasted over the eons: Team
Macaron or the multi-faceted toast genre?
So the next time a well-meaning,
inquiring mind asks what I want out of life, I might throw social
graces to the wind and pull a strategy from the pumpernickel
playbook:
“What is my life-plan? To be a little
more like toast.”
I never realized I was so unacquainted with toast! I suppose I unconsciously started to avoid it due to the whole "don't eat carbs" movement, and now I see what a waste that was.
ReplyDelete"I want to taste like home..." that blew my mind. thank you for helping me realize, that I too, aspire to be more like toast. This made me smile wide, and is a post I will be coming back to again and again!
Rachel Emily
I love it! Thank you, Rachel. I feel the same way.
ReplyDeleteDING DING DING I NEEDED THIS!
ReplyDeleteI love this post, Rachel. Thank you so much. <3
ReplyDeleteYES
ReplyDelete