One Small Thing Podcast

Moving to the farm has changed quite a few things, and one of the more unexpected changes is that we now live on bread made here, which I am very pleased about, and perhaps slightly too pleased about, because for the four years before this I had tried repeatedly to make a sourdough starter and every one of them had died.

I had the recipe, I added the flour and water, I waited for the starter to bubble, and when the instructions told me to take out a spoonful and feed the starter, I took out the spoonful, threw it away, and fed what remained in the jar.

Anyone who makes sourdough will already know what I had wrong, but I did not, because the spoonful I was discarding was the very part I was meant to keep and feed, and so for years I was carefully following what I thought the recipe said while repeatedly throwing away the thing I was trying to grow.

A few months ago, I went to Orange to visit a beautiful woman who had just survived her cancer journey, and when I walked into her kitchen there were two amazing loaves of sourdough bread, which was enough for me to tell her that I needed to learn how she had done it.

She took a spoonful of the starter and fed it, and in that one small movement I finally understood what the recipe had meant, what I had been doing wrong and why all those previous attempts had never worked, and I could hardly believe that the answer had been sitting inside one misunderstood instruction for four years.

Since then, I have followed the recipe very carefully, although careful means something different once the recipe actually makes sense, and now we make our own bread on the farm, not because I suddenly became more patient or more capable, but because someone showed me the step I had misunderstood.

There is something both funny and humbling about discovering that effort was never the problem, because I had kept trying, I had done the waiting and feeding, and I had started again each time the starter died, but persistence could not correct an error I did not know I was making.

We can be very quick to turn that kind of failure into a judgement about ourselves, deciding that we are hopeless at something, that everyone else seems to understand it, or that perhaps we simply do not have whatever mysterious quality the task requires, when the explanation may be much smaller and far less personal.

Sometimes one instruction has been read the wrong way, one assumption has never been questioned, or one part of the process is obvious to people who already know how to do it and almost invisible to the person trying to learn, and no amount of repeating the same misunderstood step will make the outcome different.

That does not mean every difficulty has an easy answer, and it does not mean that wanting something badly enough guarantees it will work, but it does mean that repeated failure is not always a reason to give up or a signal that we are incapable, because sometimes it is an invitation to stop, look more closely and ask someone who can see what we cannot.

The lesson I took from those two loaves in Orange is not simply to follow the recipe, because I thought I had been doing that all along, it is to notice when the recipe is not producing what it should, ask the question that feels too obvious to ask, do the research, and allow someone else’s knowledge to change the way we understand the next step.

If there is something you genuinely want to do and it keeps going wrong, take your time before deciding that you cannot do it, because the part you have been throwing away may be the very part that needs feeding, and one small question may be enough to help you begin again.