Labor Day weekend, I decided to make two of my grandmother’s recipes: whoopie pies and her chocolate log. The chocolate log was my absolute favorite dessert growing up. Every time I visited, Grandma would make one for me, and she always saved me the end pieces because she knew they were my favorite. The ends were smothered in bittersweet dark chocolate, which obviously made them superior to every other piece.
I’ve always wanted to learn to make it myself, partly because I loved it and partly because I liked the idea of passing the tradition down to my own kids. Fortunately, I have Grandma’s original recipe. Unfortunately, Grandma apparently wrote her recipes for people who already knew how to make them.
There are some rather important details missing.
Like: LET THE CAKE COOL BEFORE YOU PUT THE FROSTING ON IT.
That seems obvious to me now.
It was less obvious when I watched the frosting I had just carefully made melt right off the cake.
“Well, that was a fail,” I thought. But I would not be deterred.
So I tried again. I made adjustments. I figured out what had gone wrong. And then I proceeded to make essentially the same mistake with the chocolate glaze because Grandma also neglected to mention that perhaps molten chocolate should cool a bit before being poured over the finished cake.
Another lesson learned.
At some point during all of this, Andrew suggested that perhaps I should give it a rest.
Absolutely not.
By the end of the weekend, I had made three attempts at the chocolate roll and two attempts at Grandma’s whoopie pies. The whoopie pies were finally a success.
Somewhere in the middle of my kitchen full of chocolate, it occurred to me that Grandma hadn’t really given me a complete recipe. She had given me notes for making something she already knew how to make.
She didn’t need to write down all those little details because she knew them from experience. She had probably learned some of them the exact same way I was learning them now—by doing something wrong, seeing what happened and doing it differently the next time.
And that got me thinking about how often we want life to work like a really good recipe.
Tell me what to do. Tell me what happens next. Give me the steps, preferably in the correct order, with all the important warnings clearly marked in bold.
I remember feeling this way when my first child was a newborn. I had read a book about getting babies to sleep through the night. I was a brand-new mother, so naturally I was looking to the experts to tell me what the heck I was supposed to be doing.
The book essentially said: You do this, and then the baby does that.
Okay. Great.
Except I did this, and my baby most definitely did not do that.
I can still remember the bewilderment of thinking, But the book says she’s supposed to sleep after I follow this routine. But she’s not doing sleeping! Now what do I do?
Apparently neither babies nor chocolate cakes feel particularly obligated to follow the instructions.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with instructions. I’m a big fan. Give me the recipe. Give me the book. Give me all the information you have. I will happily read it, research it and prepare myself.
But at some point, we have to leave the page and actually live.
And actual life is messier than the instructions.
We can make plans, gather information, learn from other people and prepare as well as we possibly can. All of those things are useful. But we cannot master life in advance. Eventually something happens that wasn’t in the book.
The frosting melts.
The baby won’t sleep.
Someone we love behaves in a way we didn’t expect. The plan changes. Something doesn’t work. We make a mistake. Circumstances throw us something we never saw coming.
And there we are thinking, “Wait. This isn’t how this was supposed to go.”
Maybe one of the most useful things we can learn is to stop expecting life to follow the recipe.
Life is meant to be lived, not just read about on a page. And living it means we’re going to encounter things nobody warned us about. We’re going to discover things we couldn’t possibly have known beforehand. We’re going to get some things wrong.
What happens next matters.
We may not have much influence over the unexpected thing itself, but we have tremendous influence over our experience of it through the way we respond. We can resist reality because it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. We can criticize ourselves because surely we should have known better. We can decide the whole thing is ruined.
Or we can look at the frosting sliding off the cake and think, “Well, that was a fail. What did I just learn?”
That doesn’t mean every unexpected turn in life is funny. Obviously, some are painful, frightening or deeply disappointing. But the principle still holds. The internal quality of our lives isn’t determined solely by whether things go according to plan. It is also shaped by how we meet the life that is actually happening.
Sometimes that means adapting. Sometimes accepting. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes grieving. Sometimes trying something completely different.
And sometimes it means making the damn cake again.
Which is exactly what I did.
I attempted Grandma’s chocolate log one more time, armed with everything I had learned from my previous failures. I let the cake cool. I let the chocolate cool. I rolled and unrolled and frosted and generally wrestled with this thing for far longer than any dessert has a right to require.
And you know what?
It worked (kinda).
It was not particularly pretty. Grandma’s was prettier. But I cut myself an end piece—the piece she always saved for me—and it tasted almost exactly the way I remembered.
And then I had one more realization Grandma neglected to put on the recipe card:
This thing is a bear to make.
I may very well retire the recipe now that I’ve finally conquered it. I originally wanted to learn to make Grandma’s chocolate log so I could pass the tradition down to my kids. Instead, perhaps what I’ll pass down is the recipe card—with all my additional instructions written on it—and let one of them decide whether they’re feeling sufficiently ambitious.
Because maybe participating fully in life doesn’t mean we have to keep doing everything we learn how to do. Sometimes we try something. We fail. We adjust. We try again. We finally succeed. And then, with considerably more information than we had when we started, we get to decide what we want to do next.
That’s part of living, too.
Life doesn’t happen according to a recipe. We can read the books, make the plans and gather all the information we can. But eventually we have to leave the page and participate in the life that is actually happening.
And sometimes, if we’re lucky, there’s a really good end piece waiting for us when we do.
Want to explore this in your own life?
Where are you looking at something in your life and thinking, “This isn’t how this was supposed to go?”
My free Thrive Discernment Guide can help you separate what actually happened from what you’re telling yourself it means, understand what you’re feeling, and decide how you want to respond to the life that is actually happening.
Download the free Thrive Discernment Guide and start there.
