“If you wish to bake an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.”
I love that quote from Carl Sagan. At its most basic, I find it does a good job of illustrating my personal blessing-and-a-curse ADHD tendency to get caught up looking for connections, causes, and relationships. It’s part of the reason small projects frequently balloon into larger, more complicated endeavors.
My attempts to start chronicling the work that goes into creating Drover certainly fall into that category. I might finally get this blog post published, but I have at least five other drafts on assorted topics. They have more twists, turns, and tortured metaphors than the output of a freshman creative writing class. I’m still learning how to put myself simply, thinking I have to explain the whole universe all the time.
It’s also a good reflection of one of the problems many of us have. Technology and the constant stream of content have made everyone all too aware of the Big Issues that can be linked to all sorts of other problems and how things are connected in our communities. Sagan’s words are often not so much an aspirational quote, but rather a more interesting way to remind myself not to overthink things when I get bogged down.
I did not have a particularly good Fourth of July. Parts of it were quite lovely, but there were lots of fireworks in our neighborhood. Lots of fireworks that shouldn’t have been set off in the confined space of a street between two high-rise apartment buildings. But I wasn’t mad about the fireworks. I was mad about the fireworks, but that led me to the current budgetary problems the District of Columbia is facing that removes funding from youth programs, and so on and so forth, up to worrying about the history of the U.S. that resulted in such segregated cities in the first place. And the stewing went on from there, only making me feel worse.
I know I’m not alone in that. A lot of us feel pressured to reinvent the universe these days. It’s tiring and makes us feel helpless to ever accomplish anything. But it also makes us feel smart and not to blame. We see the causes, we understand them, but what can we really do about something that complicated? The end result is that most of us sit and watch videos and read articles that explain the whys while feeling stuck on how we can make the world better. We feel like unless we can completely start from scratch it’s not worth trying.
Instead, I like to take Professor Sagan’s comment, turn it on its side slightly, and think of all the people involved with making an apple pie. The long chain of people who grow the ingredients and get them to you, or those involved in providing the energy to run the mixer and heat the oven. And we can’t forget the generations of people who honed the recipes themselves. They’re all important. Maybe none of them would actually win the bake-off prize for the pie, but they all made it happen.
Much as I’ve been telling myself that a short essay about one specific thing is better than a meandering diatribe about the history of everything, it’s up to all of us to learn to put the big issues aside to make the small, incremental changes. And this is not to say that you ignore the important stuff, but we all need to realize that we have no way of fixing it until we’ve created a better environment that makes everyone feel like they can contribute. But I hope to move on to that topic later.
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