The Edit : Cultivating strong values, apple fritters, and a love ethic

8 May

Editorial

Misfire: when our actions don’t match our values

We all feel it, that disconnect between who we want to be and who we actually are. We don’t want to be a yelling parent because we ascribe to responsive, respectful parenting, yet here we are shouting at our children. Again. We want to get back into reading because we hold in high regard the value of personal development, but…we’re scrolling Instagram at 11pm instead of picking up that book giving us the side-eye from the bedside table. We all know the areas in which we can improve, but we’re also human, and no-one should strive for perfection at all times. Where it does, however, often bite most cruelly - and chronically - is when it comes to our personal and professional goals.

While I have harboured a decades-long dream to write, I have simply not taken the steps that would allow me to achieve this goal. And when I say write, I mean write for money. The problem, I have discovered, is that I have weak values. Watery, unformed, vague.

I first came across this way of expressing it in an Instagram post by Mark Manson, author of the cult bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck (2016). Manson wrote that if we aren’t actually behaving in a way that adheres to what we profess to believe, can we really claim to hold these values and beliefs at all? I’ve also just read bell hooks’ 2000 book of critical essays, All About Love: New Visions, and in it, she conveys the same idea. When writing about the pursuit of a spiritual life, hooks writes that it requires “conscious practice, a willingness to unite the way we think with the way we act” (p.77). I’ve also been listening to Philippa Craddock’s (of Meghan and Harry’s wedding florals fame) business and marketing podcast Passion to Profit on and off for a few months, and likewise, though through a different lens, she talks often about how our daily actions, however small, have the power to either take us closer to our dreams, or further from them.

Our actions reflect our values, and if we have conviction in those values, it makes it easier to make choices that align with them.

Together, these three thinkers – all operating in vastly different spheres – cemented in my mind the stark truth: I do not write because I don’t value it enough. Why? Because I’m afraid. I am so afraid of failing that I have unwittingly pushed writing to the margins of my life. It feels so big, so unattainable, that I won’t even allow myself to think it, to imagine it as a possibility. And without a clear picture in my mind of what writerly success look like, I am unable to find any anchor points to attach my values to. I am at sea. Giving myself permission to dream large, to perhaps entertain the belief that maybe I can do this, begins to prise open a chink in the hardened shell I have imprisoned this dream in for so long. Weak values can make way for strong ones, but we need something to believe in first, and we have to make space for faith to enter.

Quote taken from the 2001 paperback edition of All About Love: New Visions, published by Harper Collins, New York.

Eat

Breakfast Apple Fritters

My girls and I had these for breakfast in bed on a crisp Autumn Sunday recently, and I have to say, there’s not much better with a hot coffee than a doughnut-y, cinnamon-infused apple fritter, especially on a damp and cold morning.These are addictive, and not hard to make at all. Bear in mind that they puff up a lot, so I suggest sticking to the teaspoon measurement I give. Also, too many fritters in the pan will lower the temperature of the oil too much, and makes it difficult to manoeuvre them as well. In a medium saucepan, I cook no more than 3 or 4 at a time.

INGREDIENTS

Mild vegetable oil, for frying

1 free range egg, separated

2 small apples, grated

2/3 cup milk (may substitute natural yoghurt)

Splash of soda water

3/4 cup plain flour (approx.)

2 t baking powder

Cinnamon sugar, to dredge*

METHOD

Begin by gently heating 2-3cm of oil in a medium saucepan over a moderate heat.
Place a metal rack over a tray to receive the fritters (letting the oil drain and the air circulate keeps them crisper) and put some cinnamon sugar in a small bowl.
In another small bowl, whisk the egg white with a fork until foamy. Set aside.
In a larger bowl, combine egg yolk, grated apple, milk, and soda water. Mix with a fork. The mixture will be quite wet.
Still using a fork, gradually add flour until the batter is of a loose dropping consistency. You may need a little less or a little more than 3/4 cup. Add baking powder and mix until everything is well combined.
Gently fold in the whisked egg white with a metal spoon. You should see little bubbles on the surface.
Test if the oil is hot enough by dropping a small amount of batter into the pan, It should colour on the underside quite quickly.
Once the oil is ready, drop teaspoonfuls of the batter into the pan. When you see it turning golden on one side (about 20-30 seconds), gently flip them with a slotted spoon and cook until nicely bronzed. Place on the rack. When you have a few done, dredge them in the cinnamon sugar until coated and arrange on a serving plate.
Continue frying until the batter is used up, coating in the cinnamon sugar as you go. If the oil gets too low, add some more and wait until it heats up before resuming frying.
Serve while still warm with hot beverage of choice.

*to make cinnamon sugar, simply combine caster sugar and ground cinnamon in a small jar and shake until combined. I prefer mine cinnamon-heavy, but use a ratio that you like.

Explore

bell hooks’ ethics of love

Certain books leave an imprint that you know will last a lifetime. Over thirteen penetrating and moving chapters in All About Love: New Visions (2000), bell hooks offers a radical ethics of love as the only rational response to a world beset by despair and fear. It’s so radical because we fail, as a culture, to face love in its most fulsome, functional, and active sense, and we are all the poorer for it.

bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky (then still a segregated town), was a Black queer feminist theorist, writer, and activist. She adopted her maternal great-grandmother’s name as her pen name when she was in her early twenties – a woman she greatly admired for her spirit – and used lowercase letters to signify that she wanted her work to be the focus, rather than the self as author.

With several degrees, and a teaching and lecturing career that spanned the US, hooks published more than thirty books of her own and contributed to many more, wrote children’s stories, articles, essays, memoir, and poetry. She is most known for her theorisations on the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Her work would lay the foundations for Kimberlè Crenshaw’s theory of intersectional feminism developed in the late 1980s.

This was my first taste of hooks’ work, though I have known about her for a long time, and I am only sorry it has taken me this long to come to it. Interweaving personal reflection with social and cultural analysis, hooks lays bare the stark reality of a society plagued by lovelessness. Beginning with a study of child-rearing, and the conditions that either aide the development of a secure, loving self or its opposite; a self driven by fear and anxiety, hooks then details how and why we condone lovelessness through our tacit acceptance of racism and sexism and their accompanying violence, our cultural fascination with death, and social policies that leave so many without the basic necessities to live a dignified life. Expanding out from the home to the political sphere, hooks argues that an “overall cultural embrace of a love ethic would mean that we would all oppose much of the public policy conservatives condone and support”(p. 91). While hooks writes from her position as a Black US citizen, it is not a stretch to apply her thinking to Western political philosophy as a whole.

This is not a book about self-love – although that is an important aspect of a love ethic – and nor is it about romantic or coupled love, though again, she explores these as vital facets of a life guided by love. This is a polemic that asks us to consider what it means to choose love. Refuting the cultural cliché that love is purely a feeling, hooks illustrates how love would be better understood as a verb. To love is to do. Love shares, love trusts, love guides, love serves. This is quite straightforward to understand when we talk about taking care of those in our circle, even of the self, but hooks wants us to consider how a love ethic can and must extend further. Love has the power to remove fear – of the other, of death, of failure. To live in love is not to live without pain in some eternal bliss, rather, it is the ability to endure and accept suffering as an inevitable part of existence. It is about cultivating the capacity to live with pain and grow from it. hooks writes that contrary to popular belief, “unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands” (p. 209). To choose love is to choose to be the pilot of one’s own destiny. It is the opposite of being a victim.

To live in love is to live in commune with others, hooks maintains. It is to actively participate in the growth and wellbeing of the group and the self. In the first chapter, ‘Clarity: Give love words,’ hooks describes how we have often failed to grasp not only love’s meaning, but to even agree on a definition. She cites several writers who have explored the topic, but invariably fall short when it comes to defining love. It is at last in the work The Road Less Travelled (1978) by M. Scott Peck, who is paraphrasing Eric Frohm, that hooks finds her definition. In her own rewording, love is “the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth” (p. 6). Understood in this way, it becomes clear that love cannot coexist with cruelty, judgement, rejection, or shame. Love is a choice to act with kindness, openness, and generosity. In its most expansive sense, love has the power to radically alter the way we act, the people we interact with, the policies we support, the choices we make in our daily lives. All About Love is an affecting call to action. A call to embrace an ethics of love. This is a book that I have no doubt I will return to as I navigate life’s path and continue to strive towards a life guided by loving action.

bell hooks passed away on the 15th of December 2021 in Berea, Kentucky.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 2001, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY.

Sneak peek of my upcoming Food Story…

“Apart from fruitcake, I can’t really think of any other recipe or dish that I recreate from my past. This is unlike my mother-in-law, who, in her late seventies, still makes and holds dear her own mother’s apple dumplings. My husband has not inherited an interest in cooking, so I feel something of a responsibility to honour the memory of this dish, and preserve it for my own children. Food connects us directly to our forebears. When we eat something that they once ate, we experience a very visceral connection to the past, and to a long line of ancestry that goes beyond the mere familial. When I first tasted the dumplings, I immediately understood why they are a perennial family favourite.”

Read the whole essay on Food Stories, coming soon…

meredith birrell

The Edit : Cultivating strong values, apple fritters, and a love ethic

Editorial

Misfire: when our actions don’t match our values