Shortsighted

I just got back from my friend Amber’s house for dinner. This is exactly the kind of way I like to be social, these days: someone’s house that is walking distance from mine, yummy food, nice people, and home by 9 pm.

Amber is in cooking school this year and every now and again when she has too much—homework, I guess you’d call it—she hosts these great Five Dollar Dinners, where you pitch in a bit for any extra ingredients and then shovel all her hard work directly into your face. She was doing ‘farinaceous carbs’ this time around, so we had two kinds of pasta with two kinds of sauce, two types of gnocchi (I didn’t know there were types!), a risotto, and then a roasted broccoli salad just to get something non-carby in there. Oh, and little fried polenta things, too, start with. All handmade! I had a bit of everything and it was so so so so good.

Cooking school has been on this girl mind for a long time—I think pretty much since I’ve know her. I met her for the first time on a kayak trip, what seems ages ago now but was only four years, and we did the trip shop at Pak N Save, not even knowing each other at all. (Four years later, we still like to do errands together; just a couple of weeks ago we went to that same Pak N Save and then to the Asian grocery across the street where I got two packets of delicious dried seaweed). I don’t remember if she told me about loving to cook and wanting to open a café, but it’s hard not to know that about her. She cooks everything and feeds everyone and has been wanting to do this for so so so so long. This is finally the year, for her, after so much time and so much trouble and so many difficulties. She’s cooking all day every day for school and for work and then coming home to cook more for her friends. I couldn’t be more proud or more impressed.

What I admire, even maybe more than her ability to work ridiculously hard, is her vision. I like to plan short term but am not very good at the big picture. Present me with the opportunity to go to Thailand for a month and I will download the language apps and research the train timetables and form opinions on dive sites with some vigour. Ask me what I want to be doing with my life in five or ten years and I will tilt my head to the side and squint into the middle distance, unable to see myself doing anything differently to how I do it now. Shortsighted, I guess: only able to see the next couple of steps of my path.

Not so this woman. She pondered and planned for a long time to do this one thing, to go this one way. I know there have definitely been detours and disruptions along the way, but from what I can tell she’s always had a goal in sight. I admire that so much. I envy that so much. How does it happen, how do you learn to focus so intently? Is it something you can learn or are you just that way or not?