Today I made a poached egg

This year I made a goal for myself to learn how to make a poached egg. Today was the day. See below.

It’s like how my new year’s resolution every year is “pet more dogs.” Very doable. Even, in some way, designed to throw others off the scent (you may think I am a poor cook or not interested in animals based on either of these goals). Very much not revealing my actual goals for the year.

On avocado toast, no less!

But there’s a reason for that. Isn’t there some group of people - I think an indigenous population - who believe that photography steals your soul? So every time someone snaps your picture, a piece of your soul goes away. (Someone better tell the Instagram influencers.)

That is how I feel about sharing goals too early. Why the need to tell one million people what you plan to do? How about just do it? The sharing, with out any ground to stand on, in some way dissolves the dignity of the goal. It saps it of its life. Maybe because talking about it is itself satisfying enough and it feels like it has been achieved, I don’t know. Or maybe that’s how your talk yourself out of it. Or giving it voice makes it seem too large and unconquerable. For all these reasons and others, whenever I have a goal that actually means something to me, typically I keep it mostly to myself.

Which brings me to another point about goals, which is I have been thinking lately about how thoughts are things and how everything that is, began as a thought. I thought about that egg - I visualized it sitting on the top shelf of my fridge in its little clear plastic case, nestled in with its egg brethren. I visualized the water boiling, and cooling, and swirling; the introduction of just a tablespoon of vinegar, the way the white would become solid and swirl around the increasingly opaque, sunshiney yolk. The rounding, the hardening. Slipping a slotted spoon into the hot water after approximately three minutes to rescue the eggie in in its new form, and indeed to give it its rightful place of honor atop a warm piece of buttery toast slathered in pulverized avocado. Heaven. I squealed when it was done. All of this was a thought, for two months, and then there it was in front of me, a thing.

So it is for small goals, so it is for big goals. The trick is the work that must be done in the middle, to take it from thought to thing. Oh, maybe that’s it - talking feels like work, to some. (It isn’t.)

While we’re on this topic, there is an additional, much more important thought here - and arguably the only one that matters - that we exist because God thought us into being. As I have heard it explained, He loved us into existence. And He allows us into the act of co-creating by allowing us to think things into existence - careers, homes, travels, art, relationships. It is good to create, because God is the first Creator.

I merely thought a poached egg into existence. But, I’ll take it (and I did).