Pasta and Walking With a Purpose

For the past few months my Wednesday evenings have been spent with my friend C.  We've been friends for around 20 years, but the past few we've seen less and less of one another.  C has been through a hell of a couple of years, and I didn't know the extent of it until about 6 months ago.  We rediscovered how much we like hanging out with each other and food.  So every Wednesday night we meet for dinner out.

For several years C and I worked for the same restaurant.  She was the director of training and I was a trainer.  She would travel with a team of trainers and open new stores.  We have some crazy stories that can only happen when you live in a hotel together for a few weeks at a time. We talk about those years because they remind us what some of our friendship is based on.

A valuable tool that I learned from C is that whenever I was walking around the kitchen, I better know where I was going and why I was going there.  I finally figured out that if I wanted to avoid her asking me, "what are you doing now", I needed to make sure I had a kitchen utensil in my hand. Walking briskly also helped.  When I think about it now I think of it as walking with a purpose.

Walking with a purpose has never been one of my stronger suits.  I am very good at meandering through my days with not much on my plate. But I wonder how different my life would be if I were to walk with a purpose more often.  I haven't put much thought into this, so I don't know if I have much more to say about it.  I woke up at 4:30 this morning thinking about my next blog post that was going to be about making pasta with C, and this is where it took me.  I do know that one's purpose isn't always obvious or concrete. And I believe that one's purpose can be to find one's purpose.  Everyone has their own purpose.  The hard part is figuring out what it is.  Because it's always easy to just walk around the kitchen with a spatula in your hand.

C and I share a passion for food and she had never made pasta from scratch.  So last Sunday I grabbed my pasta machine, and Mary Ann grabbed her clay, and we went to C's house to make fettuccine with roasted garlic and crushed red pepper.  Mary Ann sat at the kitchen table making clay birds while C and I made pasta.