My Personal Recipe

Towards the end of this session we were asked to list what we thought were our personal ingredients be they sweet, savoury or spicy. We each read our own list when "times up" was called. From that list came the prompt to then expand the list of items into an essay. I did this in a free writing mode and then carried out just a few minor edits before the finalised version was shared and laid out below.

My impromptu ingredients were cynicism, enthusiasm, energy, a little bit of sweet and a little bit of savoury.

Warning: Contains one swear word

MY PERSONAL RECIPE

We are all but like casseroles or stews that hubble and bubble on the eternal hob called "life".

It is not eternal for us as individuals but it is for life in all of its myriad forms from the smallest of small micro-organisms in the soil to the leviathans of the seas and land. They are life.

My own personal recipe's foundation is a stock that comes from that amoebic swamp whose glutinous chemistry wallowed around the globe eons ago ago and before that somewhere out there. With that origin which is shared I am no different from you, you, or you.

Even casseroles and soups that have been made by adhering to tried and tested, even tasted, recipes will tatse slightly different they are made. It is the way that the ingredients in our Faustian pact with life react with each other.

My own personal ingredients start with a generous measure of genetic internationalism. I have roots back to England, Canada, Scotland, America, Holland and Czechoslavakia. As with the basic stock from the amoebic swamp I had no control over these ingredients, That forces me to ask if in fact I have any control at all over how other ingreients amalgamateed to make me?

Surely those influences passed down through generations have affected how I live in the world and how I view the world. I have no way of removing them in any form of controlled experiment to see what difference the presenceor absence of each would amke in me. So, here I am, stuck with what I am.

An important ingredient of my personal recipe is that of cynicism. Not the destructive sort that is so prevalent on social media that is illustrated by the following verse:

Beware the knockers who knock all

For the knockers that knock all tend to know fuck all

My cynicism, I would like to think, is a quest for knowledge and understanding pursued through enquiry. To seek, to ask, to establish and to never take anything at face value. And to look for goodness wherever it is. A journey through hope and a foundation for discrete optimism.

Added to this aalgam is an ingredient that cannot be bought let alone canned, carbonated as a drink and sold. That is energy. It comes from within me. It comes from engaging with people. be they strangers or longstanding acquitances. It does not matter. It comes from finding out something new. On a good day it is boundless. On a bad day its absence sucks the life force out oof me and no amount of engagement with people rekindles its flames. What I do on those days is act energetic until the balance is restored.