Over time I’ve learned to appreciate being an enduring apprentice Jack-of-not-all-but-many-trades over a wannabe Superman, no matter how flattering the encouragement radiating from the latter.
I certainly won’t hold it against you if you like to still look upon me that way, but please, keep it to yourself, or before you realize what you’ve enkindled it will get ahead of me, trying to live up to those expectations, blaming the inevitable failure on the amount of pressure unintentionally loaded upon me, resulting in frustration and self-doubt.
Intelligibly meant as a compliment, this one word soon becomes the motivator of a complete vicious circle, a sinister labyrinth in which I regularly got lost in in the past but nowadays I know my way around its emergency exits.
Cloud castles build on those delusory hopes do not necessarily move along with upscaling or downsizing ones dreams or life ambitions and even smart adjustments don’t make them disappear automatically, one must actively address them by attacking this problematic overestimation with a mildly ironic and teasing artist’s impression, at least that’s how it works for me, too often perished from my own successes to look back on them as such.
Our quest for a more sustainable life also revolves around this, re-identifying traditional ways and customs we can carry on with proportional ease, even if our rhythms change and our patterns are constantly disrupted by random forces of nature. Not since buying Les Pierres have I found the easiness of mind to fully trust in what remains.
When I started making cheese again last January, a bygone passion from our chateau days but upgraded to an all natural method with a culture based on my kefir and without adding rennet, against better judgement I lavishly planned to every day make one small cheese and record each step of the process in a specially designed database, to be able to control the variables of the fermentation and document my progress.
None of that pretentiousness persisted over time, obviously. I still make cheese, but once every five days and there’s no more computer registration but all resides in the head of this superman. It’s cheesy, I know.