What the Failures Feed

The Five Pillars of Slowsteading, Part Four: Develop

There is a compost heap at the bottom of the garden that could tell you most of what there is to know about how I learnt to do anything. Very little of what goes into it even reaches the heap, because the kitchen scraps and the outright disasters go to the hens first, who convert them without ceremony into eggs that come straight back into the next thing I attempt. The circle closes so neatly that it is difficult to feel very sorry for yourself about anything that has gone wrong.

In the previous blog we talked about design, and about drawing your own version rather than borrowing the shape of somebody else's. The develop pillar comes next, and it is where the skills arrive. They arrive slowly and unevenly, and almost always by way of a run of things that did not work, which nobody says out loud because the photographs only ever show the good result.

What nobody says either, and what I would like to say here, is that a failure is not simply something to be endured on the way to competence. Each one of mine has taught me something specific enough to name.

The sauerkraut, the scarf, the radishes and the soap

I once made a crock of sauerkraut so salty that not one person in this house could be persuaded to eat it, since I had judged the salt by eye instead of weighing it. Fermenting turns out to be one of the few things in a kitchen where precision genuinely matters, and I have used a scale for it ever since. That was not a wasted crock so much as a lesson in measuring properly, delivered far more memorably than any book could have managed.

I knitted a scarf that came off the needles considerably holier than the pattern had in mind, having decided halfway along that I understood the shape of the thing better than the woman who wrote the instructions. What that taught me is to follow a pattern faithfully the first time, and to improvise only once I know exactly what I am departing from. There is a lot of freedom on the far side of a pattern, and almost none at all before it.

Then there were the radishes, a magnificent crop of them, glossy and peppery and altogether beautiful, which my family regarded with polite suspicion before quietly declining to eat a single one. That is possibly the most useful thing the garden has ever taught me, which is to plant what the people you feed actually love rather than what happens to grow easily for you. Ease is not the same as worth, and a bed full of something nobody eats is just a chore with leaves on.

The funniest of them was the soap, a batch that came out of the mould smelling like something you would use on a floor, since I had followed a recipe without ever asking myself whether I liked the fragrance in it. The skill in that one is subtler than the others, and it is learning to develop your own preferences instead of trusting somebody else's blindly. A recipe tells you what worked for the person who wrote it. It cannot tell you what you want your house to smell like.

Skill is not information

Notice that not one of those was solved by reading. I could work through every book written about growing cabbages and I would still be standing in front of a bed of ruined cabbages, since I have been beaten by cabbages for three seasons running and no amount of reading has yet made the slightest difference.

What eventually shifts is not what I know but what my hands have done often enough to do without thinking. It is the difference between being handed a method, which takes five minutes, and knowing a thing, which lives somewhere else entirely and is built out of repetition. My hands understand bread dough now in a way I could not explain to you if you asked me, and there is no version of this pillar where that understanding arrives without a run of poor ones first.

And then it comes right

I have been careful about the failures because somebody ought to be, but the failures are not what keeps anybody going. What keeps you going is the moment it comes right, and that moment is far more satisfying than it has any business being.

The first time I turned cream into butter I laughed out loud in my own kitchen, partly because it had taken a fraction of the time I expected and partly because it tasted better than anything I had been buying for years. That feeling is the one I would most like to hand you, since it reorganises how you look at a supermarket shelf. You walk past the cream cheese, or the pesto, or the jars of preserves, and instead of reaching for one you think, with some indignation, that you could make that. It is a small realisation and it is oddly electrifying, and it has sent me home to attempt things I would never otherwise have considered.

These moments are also the fuel, which is the practical reason for mentioning them. One success will carry you through the next several failures without much effort, so the arithmetic of this pillar is far kinder than it first appears. You are not enduring a long run of disappointments in the hope of an eventual reward. You are collecting small illuminations along the way, and each one lights the next stretch of road.

Trust the process and do the next thing

Those are my own two phrases and I use them more often than my family would like. Trust the process is what I say when the thing in front of me looks nothing like it is supposed to, and doing the next thing is what I say when I cannot see the whole route and can only see the step.

They come out of the herb garden, which produces far more than I can ever use. I do not stand there in despair at the scale of it. I pick what is ready, I make pesto and freeze it in bags, I set tinctures going in the apothecary, and I dry whatever is left for later, and none of that requires a plan beyond the next hour. The skill in it accumulated almost without my noticing, since I was never trying to acquire a skill. I was only ever dealing with the herbs in front of me.

What I would not do

I would not hand anybody a list of the skills a slowstead requires, since there is no such list and I would only be inventing one. What I would say is that the skill worth developing first is the one you are already curious about, since curiosity is the only thing that will carry you through the failed attempts, and a sense of obligation never has.

If it is the garden that interests you, then start with a pot of something you genuinely want to eat. If it is the apothecary, then start with the salve or the tincture you would actually reach for. Nobody is marking this, and a slowstead with a flourishing windowsill and no preserves at all is not a partial slowstead, it is simply yours.

I would also say, gently, that the skills are not the point. They are how you get to the life underneath them, which is a house where good food and made things and a certain amount of quiet are ordinary rather than remarkable. It is easy to fall in love with the acquiring and to forget what it was for.

Your first batch

Choose one thing you would like to be able to do, and make it plain and small enough to attempt without ceremony. A pot of soup from scratch, a row of seedlings, a simple tincture, a crochet dishcloth.

Then make it more than once, and not perfectly, and without any expectation that the second attempt will be better than the first, because sometimes it is worse and that is simply part of it. Make it again, and then again after that, and pay attention to what your hands are doing differently by the third or fourth time.

When one of them goes wrong, ask what it is trying to teach you before you throw it out, since there is usually a specific answer and it is usually more useful than the successful version would have been. Then give the evidence to the hens, who will regard it as the best thing to come out of your kitchen all year.

In the next blog we come to the last of the five, which is doing, and which sounds like the simplest of them and is not.

What are you in the middle of learning, and what has gone wrong in an instructive way? I would be glad to know that I am not the only one still being outwitted by a vegetable, so do leave me a comment and tell me.