I love it when my daughter gets involved in rustling up a curry feast with me. When she's in the mood, she makes an excellent sous-chef.
As well as her learning the ropes, it's also an opportunity for me to let go of my own expectations and patterns, practice real patience and embrace the mess as she creates havoc in the kitchen, slops ingredients here and there and insists repeatedly,
“I can do it I can do it!!”
(usually for jobs way above her pay grade).
She thinks she can do it all, because she's working on limited data:
- She's not had to discard one of her dishes entirely, because quantities or timings were so off, it ended up inedible
- She's not yet accidentally burned herself, so she doesn't know how hot a pan on the stove actually is
- She's never hacked into a finger while she's chopping, so she doesn't know how sharp the knives really are (nor how much those bastards bleed).
After years in the kitchen, I've seen the big picture. I'm certainly no catering expert, but I know how the bits of the jigsaw fit together and nine times out of ten, maybe more, I'll be able to deliver a delicious meal… with all my digits intact.
Big picture vs. Pieces of the puzzle
My little munchkin, on the other hand, doesn't even really know there is a big picture. I give her tasks—one tiny piece of the jigsaw—and she uses what knowledge and experience she has, attacking it with gusto.
But she's clueless about how this task fits into the meal as a whole. As far as she's concerned, she's the chef right now! She's making the curry – this separate job is actually it.
She's blissfully unaware of all the things she doesn't know; the proverbial ‘unknown unknowns’.
Ring any bells?
Now, there's something else that's working on limited data.
It's your mind.
Your intellect. Your left brain. The software in your head that you've been gifted (or lumbered with, depending on how it's going for you today).
It's the most phenomenal piece of machinery known to humankind. I mean, it got us to the moon—and safely back—with its extraordinary aptitude for logic, reason and calculation.
It is vast in capacity. It's been hoovering up teraflops of data since the moment you were born, sorting, categorising, labelling, storing – it's the ultimate hoarder!
It's a machine, programmed to find patterns in the data and spit out its analysis:
- 🗣 “Here's what's wrong and here's how to fix it”
- 🗣 “This is how you are, you'd better stay in your lane”
- 🗣 “These are all your options, believe me, I have admin privileges and access to all the data, so I should know…”
There’s so much more on offer
Yet, in comparison to what's really available to us in each and every moment—the potential for fresh, new, never-before thoughts and ideas popping into form from ‘out of the blue’; from life, outside of the mind’s dataset—it's no more than a speck of dust in the cosmos.
And just like my daughter, offering helpful suggestions from her limited dataset of experience, your mind doesn't even know that all of this is on offer.
Its list of ‘unknown unknowns’ is infinite, even while it's rifling through old, stale information and insisting that it's in charge… it's the boss… it knows everything… trust it.
Make peace with it – not war
So the next time you find yourself feeling tight, constricted, stressed out or frustrated, why not see it as an opportunity to practice real patience with that machine-mind of yours.
It's doing its level best, but it knows nothing of the big picture and it knows nothing of your true nature.
It's working on limited data.
Let it do its thing, relax back into the here and now, and embrace the mess.
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft
Taking these simple truths and applying them