the flavor of life.

I burn food a lot. Not intentionally, obviously--but while cooking, and often. Pasta, omelets, fish, quesadillas—there isn't a culinary quintessential that I haven’t royally screwed up.  It’s remarkable, really. I swear that I set out with all the best intentions and plans, but more often than not I cannot NOT burn something at least a little. The other day I put a sweet potato in the oven only to have the kitchen fill up with smoke ten minutes later. Turns out a cookie had dropped during my last baking expedition, and was now ablaze and impossible to retrieve. I had to let it burn out, which was both terrifying and also sort of beautiful, in a campfire kind of way.  

Since I’m human (and being so we like to accommodate to our weaknesses), I like to think of that toasty layer of my food as a “special seasoning”. Oh, you didn't want a dash of smoky flavoring? Sorry, and, eat it anyway. You think I would be better as a somewhat well-adjusted twenty five year old, but whatever. Usually I am the only recipient of my food and lucky for me I’m not a harsh critic. It’ll work itself out eventually.

In reality, however, the burnt nature of my food often spoils what could have been a pretty good meal. It cuts through all the other flavors, masking the careful effort I put into each layer of my dish. It prevents the food from being what it could be.

And what I realized is, fear is like this.

Life is offered to us, beautiful and whole and bright, and fear spreads like wildfire and burns it to the ground. First slowly, so that we don’t know it’s happening, then all at once. And our confidence is shaken. We stare sadly at the last of the glowing embers in front of us and wonder, how; how ever did that happen? We lose ourselves and turn up like burnt toast—dry, and ashen, void of all the flavors that we once held dear.

Now, I believe that there is a place for fear. It keeps us safe in many situations, warning us that there may be danger ahead. But sometimes, fear gets a little too bold, a little too comfortable in our bodies. It starts to spread to areas it’s not welcome, starts to impede upon our truth. It becomes almost a second language to us, telling us lies about ourselves and the years to come.

And we react to this in a myriad of ways. Some of us run, avoiding anything that may be too risky by making ourselves smaller than we really are. Others of us push forward, terrified that if we don’t keep producing the world will deem us unworthy. So we fluctuate between the two extremes, never whole, never stopping to realize that perhaps our fear is telling us the wrong thing.

Fear lets us know that something is worth fighting for. It alerts us to the sense that there is something that we love, something that we long for, something that we absolutely do not want to lose. This is why so many people fear death, failure, relationships, and much more. We don’t want to watch what is meaningful to us burn down; we don’t want to experience loss in so many ways.

And that is OK. Being afraid is OK. It’s not weakness, but incredible strength. The trick is not to let our fear get the best of us—not to let it be our reality. Emotions come and go like the weather. A storm does not indicate that the world will always be dark and grey, and fear doesn't either. We get to choose what our fear tells us, how we wish to use it.

And so, I am learning to push through the storm and fight back the fear. I am learning, as Susan Jeffers put it, to “feel the fear and do it anyway”. We must keep cooking, even when it all turns up burnt. We must exercise our right to believe in ourselves and the supreme goodness that is living and falling and getting back up and doing it all over again. Most importantly, we must not be afraid of fear. 

It’s only a little smoky flavoring, after all.