Putting out the fires
Carmy: I started a fryer fire the night after I won Food and Wine's Best New Chef. I nearly burned the place down.
Marcus: For real?
Carmy: For real. And this weird thing happens, too. You have this minute where you're watching the fire. And you're thinking, if I don't do anything, this place will burn down. And all my anxiety will go away with it.
Marcus: And then you put the fire out.
Carmy: Then you put the fire out.
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We're obsessed with ending problems. We constantly feel we're a few solutions away from finally getting to a nirvana where problems no longer exist. But we never get there, do we? Because there is no there.
You see, those problems, these anxieties, are the very building blocks of our day-to-day life. They are living. I often get anxious to 'clear the decks' - finish everything on my to-do list and in my email inbox - so I can finally have time to sit down and arrive in some form of anxiety-free, problem-free paradise.
As Carmy, head chef in the fantastic The Bear, reveals, the things that worry us also fuel us. He loves cooking despite the long hours, dysfunctional relationships, stress, and addictions... But the good just about outweighs the bad. His work fuels his life, and the stress that comes with it is part of the deal. It's a non-negotiable. Letting the restaurant burn down would make his workload disappear and ease his anxiety, but it would also leave him empty.
I am anxious about getting through things, more than the average person I would guess. During the process of 'doing' I feel a build-up of anxiety in my chest telling me that it'll pass once whatever it is I'm doing is gone. This isn't a sensible way of working. It makes me focus a goal of fast completion rather than slow-paced exploration. Afteral, once that job is done, I’ll only be moving onto another, and another, into infinity.
Now, you've probably never heard this rare piece of wisdom: it's about the journey, not the destination. You're welcome. It’s become a cliche but carries a deep truth that I time and again forget.
Just this morning, I started a new language course and my first instinct was to look through all the pages I had to get through and calculate how much time it would take me. 300 hours, Christ... Anxiety started rising.
This constant habit of focusing on completion and tying it to time is a problem I have. I've had it since a young age, and I have only tried to ease it in recent years.
Sigmund Freud described in letters how he felt anxiety before travelling by train. He conjured up a half German half French word reisemalheurs - travel woes - to describe this feeling. [Incidentally, he was on his way to Blackpool when we wrote about this. No further comment on that.]
It wasn't the train that stressed him; it was the potential for so many things to go wrong en route. The loss of tickets, the delays, lost luggage, paperwork, and annoying passengers. Travelling brings with it a bucket of unknowns and much potential for chaos.
Since I was young, I’ve repeated the same routines when boarding and alighting trains. For example, when I’m on a train and minutes from arriving, I will often be the one already standing, tightly holding my bags whilst triple-checking my ticket was in my right-hand pocket for easy access to the ticket machines (because you insert the tickets on the right). Meanwhile, everyone else appears to sit in oblivious chaos, sitting in their seats reading, chatting, having a good time, and only getting up seconds before the train doors open. Somehow they make it out alive.
One day, many years ago, I recall finishing my Christmas shopping and waiting at the metro in Brussels. I was sitting clutching my various bags when a woman nearby said, with a kind smile, "you can put the bags down, you know?". I must've looked so strange, so tense. I ignored her, obviously, because putting the bags down would have cost me a good few seconds when the train did arrive and who knows what chaos might have transpired.
I clearly suffer from a case of reisemalheurs. It's strange, come to think of it, that I've travelled so much and still have hair.
I now try to be more mindful that this stress is useless. For example, if I'm running late for something (because of my wife most of the time), I will tell myself that I can do nothing between sitting in a taxi or a train and getting to the destination on time. I've done all I could do, and whatever the outcome, so be it. This has certainly made journeys more relaxing. Before, I'd constantly check the time and distance, average speed, and monitor Google maps. It was stressful, to say the least, and also a complete waste of energy. My knowledge of time passing and my act of tracking it’s passing does nothing to bend time and space to my timetable.
I'm trying to apply this thinking to my work and daily life. My stresses are mostly time-based, as if time is something I can control to avoid feeling panicked or anxious, and that failure to have full control makes me feel like I'm not doing well enough. I try to understand better that we flow with time and fighting its current is always a losing battle.
Carmy knows about these anxieties, but he also knows that the moments that bring him the most joy in life are worth the tradeoff. We’re surrounded by fires we feel compelled to put out, but there’ll always be others to take their place.