Recipe, No Recipe

Sometimes it goes like this: Open fridge. Stare. Close door. Spiral light bulb flickers on above your head. Check cupboard, spy tin of sardines. Forage for leafy things, peppery things, orange things, more green crunchy things. No bread, but a few crackers. Go back for salad dressing, a bit of goat cheese. Pumpkin seeds?

Wash, chop, toss, add, arrange, serve. Lunch! Enjoy.

Other times it's like this: Pull out the disintegrating page torn from the old Moosewood cookbook. Gather measuring spoons to follow the recipe for cornbread you've made 523 times. This ritual needs no improvements. Every time it comes out perfectly; you are astounded again.

With creativity, recipes are only a starting point. The choreographer, dancer, children's book illustrator and author Remy Charlip created a series of Airmail Dances. He made spare line drawings of dancers in a series of simple poses. Mailing them off to trusted choreographers, he encouraged them to fill in the rest. A different dance for every choreographer, ten thousand ways to connect the dots. Remy gave space for others to create in the present moment in their own dance language, inspired by these simple landmarks.

Consider how you cook, garden, be with your children, do presentations, lead meetings, make love. There's room for creativity and experimentation in all these things. Where would we be without Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star Spangled Banner? What if Luke Skywalker had not used the Force?

There's also times when we need the comfort of the consistently astounding. We just need to awaken in the present and remember to be astounded, even if it's for the 523rd time. One client was running on automatic, producing without a sense of fulfillment, "missing all the good things." Recipe or no recipe, that is our task, to not miss this being alive.