love what you do

My fascination with brewing beer began when I was working in bars and restaurants. Though I was in management, I was much more at home in the kitchen or standing behind the bar learning to mix different cocktails. Eventually I began cooking, learning how to recreate different dishes that I had tasted and developing a pallet for different varieties of wine to accompany each meal. A creative personality, I imagine the kitchen and bar appealed to some primal need of self-expression.

The explosion of microbreweries in the 1990’s, hip little restaurants that also brewed and served their own particular styles of beer, caught my imagination, and on a road trip to Dallas, I stopped into a homebrew shop and purchased a kit. I tried a few times to make a decent batch, but never really got the hang of it. Circumstances changed and the kit ended up back in the box, there to be forgotten for the next fifteen years.

Flash forward to about a year and a half ago, I was talking with a friend of mine when I discovered that he was a seasoned home brewer. Bit by the bug, I asked my brother to retrieve the kit from my parent’s attic and ship it down to me, in Dallas of all places. I began visiting the old homebrew shop and before you knew it I was making a few half decent batches of beer.  Making beer, it turns out, is like everything else, you have to do it a few times before you get good. Persistence, and a willingness to accept occasional failure are sure fired recipes for moderate success.

Most of the things that I love to do I have taught myself, and while I doubt I will ever win awards, I firmly believe that if you do what you love to do you will always be happy.  Not surprisingly, most of the things that I love to do involve making something: Painting, cooking, brewing. Though I am not sure I would say that I love to brew, as much as I love the idea of drinking my own home brew. In fact, this is an interesting quirk of my personality. In the same vein I wouldn’t say that I love to cook or paint either. But what I love to do is eat things that I have made in the kitchen, and to look at paintings that I have made.  What I really love is the moment that comes with the satisfaction of having done something well.

(I suppose one could make the argument that I love cooking or painting or even brewing more than I love, say, yard work, or hunting. And to that I would agree.)

I often say I love my work because I do what I love, namely teach art. I don’t get the same satisfaction at the end of the day that way I do with painting or cooking, probably because teaching itself doesn’t appeal to the creative aspects of my life. However teaching affords me other luxuries like talking about history, philosophy, and, in short, about the world of ideas. In this way, teaching allows me to be creative and to feel that moment of satisfaction indirectly and thus is a source of great content for me.

Ultimately, I suppose that is why I blog as well, not so much because I love writing, but because I can look back on the myriad subjects that I have written about and feel some satisfaction that I have lived a well examined life. And a pretty good life at that!