No, Regrets

My knitting has gone wrong, and I’ve had to start again. For the initiated, I made my swatch and I had the gauge about right but then, for some reason, I got carried away and possibly because I have been watching Game of Thrones for the first(!) time while I’m knitting, I switched from rib to stocking too early, my stocking stitch was much too tight and now it’s about three quarters of the size it’s supposed to be so I have to start again. For the uninitiated, I fucked it up, so I have to start again.

Starting over is frustrating, but it gets a surprisingly good rep, particularly in the lexicon of wellness and mental health. All the work you did before will still count, mistakes are beautiful, healing is beautiful, et cetera. I agree, to an extent. But what I also think is very interesting, and what certainly doesn’t get enough air-time in the perfectionist (but pretending not to be perfectionist) discourse we have about mental health, wellbeing, much of life generally, are the kinds of mistakes that can’t be undone.

I’ll give you an example. A few weeks ago, I made a tart. A very nice Anna Jones recipe, kale and butternut squash and homemade pastry. I’d come home from an intense, two-hour workout session and I was hungry. I had all the ingredients for the tart, so I stayed my hunger with a snack and decided to make the tart anyway. I made the pastry dough, chilled it, rolled it.

This is where things started to go wrong. I didn’t have a rolling pin so I used a water bottle which didn’t give it quite the even texture I had envisaged. Nor did I have the right size baking tin, or even the right kind of baking tin. I continued to improvise. Meanwhile, said the recipe, make the filling. I obliged, and began to grate the requisite one kilogram of butternut squash. This took a good half an hour by the end of which my shoulders, already tired from press-ups and doing two hours of pads and bag-work, were entirely burnt out. I was, for the second time that day, breaking out in a sweat, but I had started, so I would finish.

I blind-cooked the pastry, but I didn’t have any baking beans (which, if you don’t know, you use to weight the pastry case so that it doesn’t bubble up), so instead I used rice. A reasonable substitution, except that I forgot to line the pastry with baking parchment so, halfway through cooking, and so painfully close to conquering my butternut squash, I realised that I had essentially poured a large portion of uncooked rice straight into the raw crust of my pastry, into which it was now being baked. Friend, I fucked up the tart. But it took me nearly four hours to make so I packed it in my lunchbox and ate it all week, and I ignored the crunch in the base (I had picked out some of the rice; much of it was now entombed in my pastry crust). I told my friend the story, and she made me feel a whole lot better by telling me about the time she blended an entire bag of basil, including the bag, into four weeks’ worth of pesto and then spent the next month picking out small pieces of plastic from her teeth.

Why am I telling you this?! The tart, it was riddled with mistakes. I did not learn anything from the experience except that if I want to be making tarts on a regular basis I should buy a rolling pin and baking beans. The tart was fine, but it tasted categorically worse than it would have if I had not baked rice into its crust. Some mistakes cannot be unmade. Some of the plants I have repotted will die, some of the scars that I have on my body will not heal, just as all the things that I have said and done that I regret in my life, the paths I have taken that I wish I had not, the paths I did not take that I wish I had, I cannot correct.

I very much wonder if it is a feature of modern technology that renders everything erasable and correctable. I often think how markedly different a trade writing was for those authors working before the invention of the laptop, then the computer, the typewriter and then the printing press. Mistakes, then, were far harder to unmake. The possibility of correction is not always consolation. On the cleaner, smoother underbelly of the possibility of correction lurks the demand for perfection, under which nothing is ever quite enough, and it is easy to lose sight of the very obvious truth of life: we do not have unlimited opportunities to make things better because we do not have unlimited time.

And is this a consolation? I think so. The knowledge that we do not have unlimited time, that some things that are done cannot be undone, that some wounds cannot be healed, that some rice cannot be excavated from its pastry case: this is the texture of human life, natural life and of course death. This can be a source of despair, if you let it. It can also be a great unburdening, the knowledge that regret has its rightful place on the spectrum of human emotion, and that it does not need to be rationalised or erased, that starting over or starting again is not the same as simply starting, but this is the way it is supposed to be. Nobody has unlimited time, and this is a reality far better inhabited than forgotten.

With love, Rosie xxx

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