Task Switching

Baking is a controlled task switching exercise.  I might have three doughs to mix, one rack in the oven, three employees forming loaves, and a meeting about to walk in in an hour.  There is a necessary schizoid property to this that goes beyond your everyday short order cook kind of multi-tasking.  It is a sensation of juggling that ends up feeling like a runner's high.  Ernest Hemingway always liked to finish the day by leaving his last sentence unfinished.  To conceive of work as a flow, where one might drop in like a wave, is a means to be enmeshed in the world, and to achieve an immanence impossible in ordinary life.  The moment you tie up your apron like it was an obi, you enter into a world where you might as well be tapping a spiderweb with a tuning fork, and waiting for the resonance, set a whole series of events into motion.