The Art of Bread: Coronavirus, Sheltering, and Slowing Down

Yesterday, I made bread.

I’ve been meaning to make bread for a long time. One of my oldest and dearest friends gave me and my husband the Tassajara Bread Book for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I’ve been trying to find time to bake bread ever since. I didn’t even realize that I’ve been trying to find the time for the past two years until yesterday, when I finally baked the bread.

Baking bread takes time. The recipe for the basic Tassajara bread includes making a sponge, which rises for 45 minutes, kneading the dough and letting it rise 50 minutes, a second rise of 40 minutes, another rise in bread pans for 20 minutes, and a roughly hour long bake time. Even though the work required to make bread happens in short intervals of mixing or kneading or shaping, making bread requires attention. You must check the dough, the rise, the progress of your work. You can’t stray far from the bread. Normally, I can’t find four hours in my day to attend to making bread, even with it’s fairly short intervals of work and longer intervals of waiting.

Now, all I have is time.

Having time is surreal and strange, and highlights just how often I don’t normally have time. I don’t normally have time to go for a run. I don’t normally have time to bake. I often don’t have time to cook. I don’t have time to knit or sew or do any of the craft projects that keep piling up. When I have time, I read, or watch TV, or play video games. I use my time to decompress. And then the next day begins, and I’m stuck in traffic for hours, or working repetitively and futilely in a too bright office, or finally making to the gym (I love my gym!), or doing chores around the house that can’t be delayed any further before I take off my shoes and finally sit down on the sofa. My days all run together like the spokes on a hamster wheel. And no matter how fast I go, I always get nowhere.

I’ve been frustrated with the balance of my life for years. My job has a lot of advantages (and right now, a major one is being able to telecommute, so I still have a salary and we still have health benefits. With my husband’s loss of work, this is invaluable.), but it’s not rewarding, it’s not challenging, and it’s not inspiring. I’ve struggled finding the balance that I want, partly because I spend 3-4 hours a day in traffic (which, as it turns out, is completely unnecessary, since I can do every aspect of my job from home).

But working from home has changed everything. When I get stuck on a problem for work, I can get up and start the laundry, or water the plants, and then come back to the problem. I’m not limited to browsing Facebook or the internet to reset my brain, instead, I can do meaningful work around my house. Without the constant interruptions that I receive in my office, I can focus, and reset, and think more efficiently. I’m an agent of my own work and my own productivity. And when I’m done with work, I’m not frantically rushing through my household chores. When I’m done, I’m done. And if I have an idea for work later, past working hours, I can still log back in and try it out, instead of letting it vanish because I don’t have access to my office notes and software. I’m more productive now than I think I have been in the last eight years of working in my office every weekday during standard business hours.

And while working from home has given me the balance I’ve been craving for years, I would like to leave my house for something other than a jog around my neighborhood. But I also find myself dreading the end of sheltering, and returning to my office (don’t get me wrong—I most certainly want coronavirus to end, everyone to get their jobs back, and for toilet paper to become the mundane object it once was instead of the coveted commodity it is now) because I don’t want to lose this balance. I don’t want to lose this slowness of life.

This is not to say that I’m not experiencing anxiety. It’s taken me weeks to finish writing this blog post, because in the middle of any given day, anxiety leaps from around the corner and knocks me down on the floor, leaving me a tear sodden mess. I’m certainly not living through sheltering in place free from worry. I’m terrified of getting cornavirus (I have asthma), of my husband getting it, or my family getting it. I disinfect everything. I don’t go to the store. Yesterday, I forgot to order butter online and broke down in frustration that I couldn’t run to the store to pick up a pack of butter. Instead, I had to place another order that met the minimum ordering requirements (which I’m going to wait to do). There are most definitely drawbacks. And while we’re not yet panicking about our income loss, we’re starting to consider doing so in the next few weeks.

But even with the obvious negative effects of sheltering in place, there are invaluable perks. Now, every single morning, I have time to have coffee on my porch. I have time to go for a run. I have time to garden. And I have time to bake bread. I finally have the balance in my life that I’ve wanted for so many years. And that’s something that I don’t want to end.

I hope we learn something from this. And not just that we need better healthcare (that isn’t tied to employment), and that we need better preparedness, and that we need drastically better leadership in America. I hope we learn that the life we’ve been told is inevitable, the fast-paced, consumer-driven, heavy-traffic, bland office, routine hamster wheel life, isn’t inevitable at all. It’s something we chose. Something we bought into, quite literally. I hope we learn that we can make a different choice, a slower choice, to live our lives with leisure. Leisure is what I’ve been missing for years. We talk of “down time” as if it’s the same thing (it’s not), and “leisure,” in our productivity-driven society, has become taboo. Why? Why is it so bad to want to sit on your porch and drink coffee? Or to go outside and walk for the sake of walking? I’ve come to realize that I need a certain amount of leisure and creative lassitude in my life, and now that I have it, I’m not giving it up without a fight. I hope we all fight for it, for leisure, for freedom from productivity and production. I hope we fight for it for every single one of us, along with paid sick leave and paid vacation. I hope we don’t return to normal when this is all over. I hope we make something better.