“All great changes are preceded by chaos.” 

-Deepak Chopra

 

So maybe I have been wrong all these years. Maybe isn't not that I dislike change, maybe it's that I dislike chaos. 

With all the contradictory and jumbled-up emotions I feel jockeying around inside me for a position of dominance (excitement, nostalgia, anxiety over all there is to get done) I think I have pretty much reached my chaos limit. Yet, everywhere I look I see my external world suddenly full up to the brim with it, too. And it so perfectly mirrors the disorder inside me the whole scenario is a bit, well, bleak.

Boxes and totes. Piles of framed photos and artwork and clothes. Packing paper. To-do lists. Bank documents. A Goodwill stack that grows daily. I know it is temporary. And I also know it is merely the beginning. But it is chaos. And it is stressing me out.

Maybe that's why I've taken to baking. Maybe I'm trying to tell myself that if only I turn a counter full of rather random ingredients into something warm and edible everything will be okay. Like that universal notion - fixing a problem with food. 

Except it's not the eating that I find therapuetic. It's the making. The order of it. The method. The precision. My entire life is about to reside in a very large and mobile pile in our garage but in my kitchen, well in my kitchen I can corral and measure the tiniest of salt crystals into an 1/8 of a teaspoon quantity. And add them to uniform cubes of butter, dark drizzles of vanilla, dusty clouds of cinnamon, exact mounds of snowy sugar. And before long baking away in my oven is a creation whose scent alone can turn even boxes and bare walls into something resembling a home.