1. Everything takes longer than I think it will; and definitely longer than the experts say it will.
When I bought my Insta Pot, they said, “Dinner will be ready in 15 minutes,” which I translated into 7.5 minutes because I am “efficient”. What they don’t tell you is that after food prep, after pressurizing the pot, and before releasing the steam, the dinner takes 15 minutes. Include all those other processes, and we’re at 45 to an hour.
As I spend time at home, I’m acutely aware of all the things I think I can make happen. My expectations are not aligned with the accepted social construct of time.
And despite what we’ve been told, I don’t actually have excessive time on my hands. But somehow, I’ve convinced myself that I do.
If you lived with me, you might have heard me say that Quarantine will be great because we can get the yard picked up, the upstairs painted, the basement cleared out, our closets cleaned, the garage bay cleared, and maybe even get a bulldozer to make a new spot for Kayla’s car.
A wonky relationship to time isn’t new for me, but the Quar has definitely made it worse.
I still work for a living. Nothing about my own time has changed. Maybe it’s changed for the kids, but I’m not even sure that’s true. And I don’t know about you, but my kids aren’t lining up to ask me how I think they should fill their time right now.
Mindset (what we choose to believe or not believe about our thoughts) is everything and my mindset, like the marketers of the Insta Pot, is a big, fat, liar.
2. If I don’t follow the directions exactly, nothing works the way it should.
Have you ever skipped the part of the directions that say to put liquid in the Insta Pot? Or decided you didn’t have to saute the meat first? Yeah, dinner wasn’t so good those nights. Or didn’t happen at all.
I often think I can “interpret” the rules. Or even that I know better than the experts, despite lots of practice being wrong.
Cats don’t have dogs; cats have kittens. Why would I think that my children are going to be any different from me? They are kittens. They ALSO think they can be “interpret” the rules.
At the beginning of the “social distancing movement,” we told them they could each see ONE friend. That one friend turned into a party. Social distancing wasn’t practiced. Nothing worked the way we thought it should.
Just as we shouldn’t make up the recipe with an Insta Pot, I can’t pretend I know more about a pandemic than the public health experts without also accepting that things won’t turn out well.
3. If I impatiently rush the process, I’ll get burned.
When I am feeling particularly impatient about my dinner, I manually release the steam on the Insta Pot instead of allowing it to do its thing on its own.
Inevitably, I end up getting burned by that steam, making a mess of the cabinets, and don’t enjoy the process.
Ain’t that the truth. I know that if I push my way through this quarantine, bend the rules to fit my needs, and leave my home before I’m cleared, I’ll get burned. Or worse yet, I’ll burn someone else. I’ll end up feeling bad and making a mess of the world around me.
For today, I’m gonna take out the Insta Pot, read the directions, manage my expectations, be realistic about what I can do and how long it will take, do all my prep work, actually FOLLOW the directions, and if the pressure gets high, I’m gonna do a slow release and not let it all out at once with a blast.
I don’t want my paint to peel and I want to keep my environment intact.
And just like they spend hours every day thanking me for the dinners I cook, my family will thank me for these lessons, as well.
A girl can dream, can’t she?
