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The other day I decided to give into the quarantine trend and bake bread. Take it as being more independent, wanting to eat healthier or preparing to survive after the apocalypse, but I have been more invested in growing, preparing and preserving my own food for the past year and making bread seemed the next reasonable project to cross off my list. To punish myself even more, I decided my first attempt at regularly making bread (perhaps my second attempt at baking bread in my entire life) should be sourdough bread. You know, the bread that comes from recipes and dough starters passed down from generation to generation? The bread known for being delicate and finicky? The one that takes hours, if not days to prepare, rise, and bake? I thought eh, why not give it a go.
Now I am sure you are shocked to learn that the bread turned out terribly.
- I let the dough rise for too long
- I put too much of the dough in my dutch oven so the bread never fully cooked through
- I burned my hand because I never knew how hot a dutch oven could get
- I broke my oven door
- The bread itself just tasted bad
By 11pm my apartment was boiling from heating the oven for hours, I was exhausted and the bread was in the trash.
The most important part of this story however, is that I didn’t consider the event a failure. If anything I went to bed chuckling to myself about the night’s events. Most importantly, I knew that (once my oven is fixed) I will still try to bake bread, and hopefully I will get better at it. Even more so, I enjoyed the process of the bread making. I liked kneading the dough, watching it rise, learning about the rights and wrongs of baking sourdough, and even though it didn’t turn out in the end, I am glad I had that moment of calm where I sat in my kitchen, kneaded my dough and let my mind wander.
Most people who say they are not the creative type, often don’t think of being creative in this way. I know of many left-brained thinkers who have sat down and tried to draw a bowl of fruit, struggled to make it look just right, became frustrated with the outcome, and gave up on the creative process as a whole, thinking that it just wasn’t for them. When in reality, the vast majority of people are born with creativeness inside of them. Being able to problem solve is a form of creativity. Storytelling is creative. Reading and listening to music builds those creative muscles.
While waiting for my bread dough to rise, I spent my time reading the book Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, by the great comic and writer John Cleese, who starts the book with the words “by creativity, I simply mean a new way of thinking about things.”
The most important thing to remember when trying to do something creative, is that it doesn’t matter how the finished product will turn out. If it is your first time trying it, the outcome will probably not look great, but what would you expect if you have never tried it before! It’s like trying to run a marathon when you have never so much as gone on a jog. What is most important is that you enjoy the process in between.
This is why nearly everyone has some spark of creativity within them. We all have some artistic talents and imaginative gifts, but we just need to build some time working on it, and enjoying the process of it. So I’ll leave you with a favorite excerpt of Cleese’s book, and hope that this rambling blog post may have inspired you to do something that works out those creative muscles you definitely have within you.
“When you start something creative for the first time, you have no idea what you are doing! But, whether you’re writing or painting or composing a song, you need to start with an idea. As a beginner, it’s not very likely that you’ll come up with a very good one. So ‘borrow’ an idea from someone you admire–an idea that really appeals to you personally. If you start working on that, you’ll make it your own as you play with it. You’re learning, and learning from something or someone you admire is not stealing. It’s called ‘being influenced by’.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can slavishly copy exactly what another person has done. That is stealing. And, in any case, what would be the point of doing that if you’re trying to produce something creative?”
— John Cleese
