Live Deliberately

One of my favourite words is deliberate: I long to live more of my life deliberately.

E.g. I'm fascinated by the coffee hobbyist community. People like James Hoffman make these wildly specific, wildly popular videos dialling in every element of the coffee-making process: how many grams of beans, how small should you grind them? How many grams of water, and at what temperature? Along the way he blind-tastes the results of all these tiny experiments and figures out which procedure gives the best coffee outcome.

I don't personally have sufficiently specific coffee taste to do this myself – if a cup of coffee is Good Enough that's good enough for me. But it's important to note the spillover benefits from the coffee hobby community to myself: their optimization of the 100% perfect coffee makes my 80/20 coffee miles better. I can easily buy high-quality beans now because other people care a lot about getting the best beans, and I can easily buy a $35 dripper that makes really good coffee and is extremely forgiving of half-assed preparation methods, all because somebody else cared to live deliberately.

Similarly, one of the great transformations of my understanding of cooking was when some combination of Samin Nosrat and my famous coblogger Jehan showed me how to cook deliberately: you make a thing, then add salt, then taste, then add more, then taste, then add more, etc. Then maybe you can write down what you did, and next time you cook the same dish you can pay attention to what you're doing differently, and slowly stumble towards a more perfect bouillon.

A non-deliberate chef might implicitly run 1 or even 0 experiments each time they cook, while a deliberate chef is effectively running 10 or more, and noticing the results. Over the course of a year that's thousands more pieces of feedback, which often compound and combine, and (at least for me) the upshot is both tastier food and a more immersive, enjoyable experience of cooking it.

So far I've been talking about deliberate in a kind of analytically-minded continuous-improvement way that I know not all of you love. But as some of you will already have noticed, I stole the phrase from the transcendant Henry David Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

As is too often the case, I have not in fact read Thoreau past a few great quotes, although I did visit Walden Pond and had a lovely time there. But what I like about deliberate is that you can live deliberately in an intuitive way, as well as an analytic one. If you'll forgive me a second quote from a person I haven't read properly, but who influenced me a lot anyhow, the poet-politician (not a coincidence) Aime Cesaire once wrote: Above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator. Because life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.

Ironically – or cosmically-fittingly – deliberate [adj] contains its own downfall, deliberate [verb]: you can deliberate your way out of doing anything at all, deliberate or otherwise.