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Bagel perfection

Two weeks ago, my husband and I tried making bagels. This wasn't because of some sudden ambition on our part or a particular fondness for baking (though I do like baking if it involves dessert and he is our designated bread maker). It came out of necessity because he has been missing the bagels in NYC that we bought from the local grocery store whenever he visited. We would eat them for breakfast lathered with cream cheese and veggies. They are however, apparently not a thing in Finland so our only option was to make them ourselves.

Bagels, in case you don't know are notoriously difficult to make. I knew this. He brushed my doubts aside and said happily "Let's try."

Bagels take a day and a half to make. You make the dough, let it rise, shape them, and then let it prove for 12-24 hours before boiling and then baking them. We didn't have some of the ingredients, starting with the right kind of flour. My husband said it didn't matter and powered through. After shaping them, we had some pretty nice-looking bagels.

Bagels before boiling
They expanded the next day and we laughed at how giant they had become. But when it came time to boiling them, we had trouble taking the sticky rings off the parchment paper and getting them in the pot still looking vaguely ring like. My husband, who was doing most of this bagel making work, got rather frustrated. They had looked so good up until that moment and he didn't like the suddenness of everything going wrong. They also expanded more after boiling and so now they were not only misshapen, but twice the area of a normal bagel. This is what they looked like after baking.

My emotions through this process was something like this, excitement after seeing our perfect rings the first day, nerves at starting boiling, frustration at my husband's frustration about our perfect rings becoming blobs of dough, dread at the though of having to eat said blobs. Anticipation and curiosity when they came out of the oven.

Notice the one on the middle right

It's the dread that I find the most interesting. The bagels looked hideous (more so before they baked, I assure you). I dreaded what they would look like after they baked. 

What I didn't have then though, was perspective. Because those misshapen ring-blobs that we had were actually a blessing in disguise.

This realization came to me this morning, after a very nerve wracking and horrible recording I made for a meditation teacher training course I am taking this semester. After I calmed down from the fiasco and reflected while not caught in the high tide of emotion, I realized I could finally let go of the perfection that I had been holding onto the whole time. That perfection, and my desire to uphold this image of my perfect, meditation-teacher-naturale image were a weight I didn't realize were so burdensome to carry. 

It's similar to our new car that we finally bought to replace my husband's 16 year old clunker that was  making a death rattle as it threatened to break down any day. Our new car is used, but only just, and it still has that delicious new-car smell and shiny exterior. I never cared if I accidentally hit the old car with my snow boots. Now I cringe if my foot so much as touches any part of the car. I know that until it gets its first scratch (because it will get scratched, or just get old, eventually), I will walk timidly around it.

I also realized that moving away from perfectionism might give rise to new ways of thinking that hadn't come up before. Last semester I worried quite a bit about my CV, which by Finnish standards for immigrant job seekers, is lousy. It isn't that I haven't done things, just not the right things and so, from the advice I got from multiple researchers, means working at a university or getting funding will be very difficult. Eventually I decided that I wouldn't worry about my less than perfect CV. This opened me up to different opportunities since I stopped chasing the same teaching and research jobs every academic in Finland and at Teachers College was looking for. I started volunteering, a new storytelling project, collaborations with researchers and non-researchers. I started learning how to teach meditation.

The funny thing is, the same happened with our bagels. They didn't look great, but they tasted amazing. And, I at least would say they were better by looking weird because no respectable NYC bagel shop or grocery bakery would sell such things. We had made these with our own hands.


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