Ramblings of the Sleep Deprived Student

I love cooking. Like writing, I don't think I realize how much I enjoy either activity until I take it up again after a period of inactivity. Surgery has been my two months of inactivity, but I'm starting to break free. On the weekends, I force myself to take time just for me. Like this weekend. Yesterday I spent the better part of the afternoon planting, enjoying the sun on my back, the soft, loamy first between my fingers, and the beautiful green of newly planted tomatoes and herbs. I await the day that the secrets of the seeds and corms I planted burst forth in splashes of color, a welcome "hello" from Mother Earth, herself. 

Today, I invented "everything but the kitchen sink" breakfast quiche. I threw whatever veggies I could find into a pan to cook, added eggs, milk cheese, and poured it all over a wonderfully toasty hashbrown crust. See cooking for me is something entirely different from baking (except bread). Certainly, similar tools are used, but cooking is much more like art, while baking is something of a science. Baking requires exact measurements, exact times, exact exactness. My life is the human version of baking. I have to be exact, precise, no more, no less. When I get home, I shed my perfectionistic skin for something more fluid, more dynamic. Like cooking. Cooking is all about a little of this, a little of that. Timing is when it's done. The ingredients change each time I make the dish, so it's never a clone of the time before. I like it that way. I have in my head an idea of what the end result will be, but the road to get there rambles, visiting different areas each time. It never looks the same.

Just like writing. I can write ten different poems about the same thing, and they will say it all in different ways. Each will have its own rhythm, some will rhyme, many won't. Some will be a more somber view, some seductive, others downright risque, but all talking about the same entity. When poems become too rigid, their meaning disintegrates, the reader is left feeling like they just weren't quite to the full meaning, and the author is left frustrated by the lack of communication. But fluidity, allowing for a moment the suspension of rules, constraints, the weights of life, and that's when ideas soar and communication meets understanding. Like love.

Love is indescribable. Everyone knows when they've felt true love, but no one can describe what it is. We all have images, moments that we describe when asked about true love. Mine is knowing that I never have to go through the most difficult parts of being a doctor alone; knowing that I can always talk to my mom and dad, that they will understand what I'm going through because they have been there before. Mine is knowing that my life jar is overflowing with the rocks that keep it full and steady, that make less room for the unimportant sandy small stuff while still providing support for the pebbles that ultimately help to fill out the enriched life I live. Love is knowing that there's one more special rock out there for me, and we're going to bump into each other one day while he's using my yellow umbrella to keep the rain off him (HIMYM reference, fyi). Love is being patient enough to allow that moment to happen when and where it's supposed to. Like life.

Life is one's rambling across the timeline of the world. We each are like ants following the scented trail. We all have an idea of where we are coming from, and a semblance of an idea of where we're going. But watch the ants sometime. Although they are all following the same trail, each one has his or her own unique way of tracking it. Each ducks, weaves, and swerves across the path in a different way. We are all like those ants, we know where we've come from and where we are going, but our paths are all different. I suppose at this point I've rambled on enough about nothing and everything. I have lost found and relost my train of thought, my organization waxes and wanes. Perhaps one day I'll be able to make sense of it all.