I have joined the ranks of those people who have turned to bread-baking during this time of self-isolation. Well, I joined their ranks a few weeks ago, but it was only yesterday that I baked a loaf of sourdough with which I was actually satisfied.
I’ve baked a handful of other loaves, but because all of my attempts to create a sourdough starter from scratch failed, I resorted to a jar of yeast—otherwise an endangered species at all grocery stores these days—residing in my pantry. The bread was middling to good, with a handful of failures. And to be honest, with this one I still had to cheat a bit—when I saw individual packets of instant starter on a Sobeys shelf otherwise scoured clean of yeast, I grabbed a few. I fed the starter for a week (and continue to do so). And then, after finally learning what “autolyze” meant, I made this loaf.
And then, according to quarantine law, I proudly posted a picture of the loaf on Facebook.
Here’s the thing: I’ve actually long been interested in making sourdough from scratch, but have always been frustrated in my attempts to find a simple, step-by-step recipe; for basic bread, there are hundreds, but once you venture into the realm of sourdough, it’s as if you’re seeking entry into some sort of mystical society. What ingredient lists you can find are inevitably buried in lengthy discussions of wild yeast, finicky lists of the pros and cons of different flours, how best to “autolyze” your dough, how to properly feed and sustain your starter, and so forth. And by the time you get to the step-by-step instructions, they tend to break down the process into day-long increments, usually starting at nine in the morning and only culminating by early evening.
In other words: it requires patience.
I’ve been thinking a lot about patience, ever since my requisite fortnight of quarantine ended and I was able to make my first grocery shopping trip. The whole experience was bizarre, though it has since become commonplace: waiting in a fathom-spaced line outside the store because they limit the total number of shoppers inside; following the arrows that have been placed on the floor; keeping your distance from the person in front of you; waiting while the person in front of you—or the person in front of the two or three people in front of you—stares at the shelves in perplexity, looking for the product they need or trying to remember what it was, or (as is now not uncommon) trying to figure out a substitute for what isn’t currently stocked. Then at checkout, you wait in another carefully spaced line, and wait while the cashier disinfects their station and the conveyor belt before putting your purchases down.
It occurred to me then, and it’s something I have commented on to people since—especially to the cashiers and other shoppers when they apologize for how long they’re taking—that one benefit of this experience is it’s making us learn patience.
We see it on social media in the massive puzzles people are doing, or all the board games that have been dusted off, or the new crafting projects people have taken on—and, yes, in the ubiquitous baking of bread, which a busy day that takes you away from the home makes a more onerous task. Yes, part of all this has to do with finding ways to ameliorate boredom, but boredom and patience have key elements in common. After all, what is acute impatience if not an expression of boredom—with how long the stoplight is taking to change, with the person torturing the cashier over coupons, with the slow walkers hogging the sidewalk? We have, over the last few decades, become a culture that valorizes speed and efficiency and vilifies unproductiveness and lassitude. A common sentiment expressed in this period of enforced lassitude has been the anxiety over not using this time productively, as if being forced into inactivity makes one morally obliged to write that novel or screenplay, to learn a language, or finally get around to reading War and Peace or Middlemarch. I looked forward to my obligatory quarantine with the thought that I would write so damn much. Spoiler alert: didn’t happen. It took me three weeks of boredom and doing nothing before I wrote more than notes in my journal, and even then it has mostly been this blog—which as I commented in my post-before-last, is as much a coping mechanism as anything.
All of which isn’t to say that we aren’t impatient for this to all end and to get back to normal. But here’s the benefit of boredom, and the patience it necessitates: it allows us to conjure up new normals, which might have been unthinkable beforehand. It opens a mental space to recognize the fallacious elements of the very idea of “normal,” and that what we had before wasn’t an inevitable state of being. And, hopefully, it makes those of us privileged enough to be bored more understanding of those for whom “normal” was a shitshow, and to make common cause going forward.
it's all narrative 