Practice

to be published as lost and found column#18

 

It was that fateful night, when I was home alone, extremely hungry, and on the verge of tears trying to open a can of tuna alternately with a knife and a can opener, that I decided I had to learn to cook.

 

It used to be a strange source of pride for me that I was a girl and couldn’t cook. I figured I could always earn enough money to eat out every night. And once I had a family to feed, I’d just make sure to marry a man who knew how to cook. Simple.

 

But when I realized that all the guys I knew could feed themselves, while I couldn’t even open a can of tuna, breaking the mold of female domesticity didn’t seem so cool anymore. With my natural inclination to sleep off hunger instead of attempting to find my way around the kitchen, I knew I was doomed for starvation.

 

Cooking, I decided, was not a gender issue but a basic survival skill. I was a human being: I had to know how to feed myself if I ever got stranded on an island where everything had to be taken (and killed!) straight from the earth instead of from a grocery shelf. Besides, I have this dream of feeding my kids only food organically grown in our backyard, and no influx of hormones—yes, I see this now—will magically endow me with culinary (and gardening) skills once I give birth.

 

I need practice now. That nitty-gritty, get-your-hands-dirty, boring way of doing things repetitively—something I’ve never really believed in till recently. I’m a proponent of the “don’t work hard, work smart” philosophy. Get the gist of the general principles and you can figure out how to do what needs to be done when you need to. It’s the perfect method used by the brilliantly creative but incorrigibly impatient and lazy. Especially for passing math.

 

But truth is, some things can’t be learned unless you do them again and again and again, until your body blends with the rhythm, your senses are fine-tuned, the tools become part of your hands, and the motions instinctive, none of it needing to go through a single neuron of rational thought. Practice makes perfect: it’s a scientific fact.

 

You have to play the same scales over and over at the piano every day, even if you’re a virtuoso. You may think nothing has changed, that you’ve figured out the best way to do this thing, and can’t possibly get any better. But your fingers do learn, become more fluid every time.

 

The things we were born to do don’t take off until we put in the requisite time for practice. It seems a necessary test the universe puts us through. We fail in our first attempts, to the detriment of our egos. Unless we accept that failure is a teacher and keep at it, with diligence and full faith that we are doing exactly what we are meant to do, it will remain a fond childhood memory, a hobby we once “tried”. We are given a gift, and as a price we must practice; otherwise, we lose the precious little we have.

 

So I must keep lighting the stove through good days and bad, through fragrant spices and half-cooked rice, just as each day I continue to weave the words, capture light and shadow, breathe the music despite the off-key notes. Just as my heart loves more gracefully with every wound it bears, so my burnt fingers will memorize the recipes my mind has never grasped.