On the Having, Eating of Cake

Recently having had a cake in my house - a rare thing, perhaps twice a year - made us think about the saying "You can't have your cake and eat it too." It makes no sense. If you *have* a cake, what's there to stop you from eating it, too?

So we looked into it. (Thanks, Wikipedia!) And we found that it's frequently misunderstood, in exactly the way I describe above. But what it really means is that it's impossible to both have the physical object of the cake AND to consume the cake. Once you eat it, you no longer have it. And that gave me a really nice appreciation for this particular food idiom. You can either be in possession of something but not get to enjoy it...or you can consume it but then it's gone. It's very meditative.

I have been looking into studying vipassana, or mindfulness, meditation for a few years now, and while hardly a regular practitioner, there are some concepts from it that I think have proven incredibly useful tools for me. One of which is the idea that we so often live our lives rethinking about what has happened, or concerning ourselves with what might happen in the future, rather than experiencing the present moment.

I think that's always true of me, anyway, but particularly having switched jobs in the last year. I hesitate to say "having switched careers", because having left museum work, which I did consider a career, I was happy to land a job in something different that I didn't know a whole lot about. And I like doing training for now, but I'm not sure it's a "career" for me (and I even question whether I care about having something I can label as a "career" anymore anyway). But there was a lot of disappointment in letting my museum career go (I think especially since it wasn't exactly by choice). My last museum job I thought I had finally landed my "dream job," only to find the workplace was fraught with all kinds of issues that made it anything but. And then I think about how if I am to achieve my "dream job," I'm going to have to create it myself somehow...and what that "dream job" looks like now, I have no idea, but maybe it's something around food and writing. But then, just as I'm thinking, hey, just do what you love to do in your spare time and work will, er, work itself out, I came across the article "I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter" in the New York Times this week. A cautionary tale. Not only did I really identify with the phrase "I realized then that what had seemed like a dream job...would hold more humiliations than I'd imagined," she also goes on to detail two paths. The path of the cook or chef personality who grows to such popularity as to merit a cookbook...only to be so overextended as to require a ghostwriter to craft and invent recipes that reflect their own outlook on food and cooking. And her own path as the ghostwriter, whose skills and contributions as the food writer she'd hoped to be go largely unacknowledged,  unrecognized, and end up being exploited in her "dream job."

I'm not really sure what the overall point of her article was, but here's what I took away from it: It almost seems like you can either do your dream work (but not necessarily for a job/career) or you can have your "dream job" only to find that means you can't possess the satisfaction and fulfillment that you thought would come with it. You can't have and eat the cake.