Making Room for Imperfection
The space and permission we unexpectedly find around every drip, splash and splatter
When I pulled up to Esperanza Lake Resort, about an hour’s drive from Vilnius, Lithuania, my shoulders slid in glorious, grateful appreciation down my back as my feet pulled up a most reassuring energy and solace from the ground below. My lungs expanded as the fresh, crisp forest air pushed a revitalizing sense of peace and calm throughout every last inch of me.
All at once, I felt empowered and invincible, insignificant and perfectly, blissfully small.
The magnificent view that stretched out in front of me – the towering pines, the still lake, the cloak of uninterrupted quiet – wasn’t just what I had needed to reclaim my footing in Vilnius; it was what I had secretly craved all summer long. I had needed all this space and distance.
One of the more confounding outcomes of charting out a life on my own terms has been discovering that the further I have drifted from corporate life, the more I have gone out of my way, it seems, to manufacture my own stress and pressure. I can’t help but wonder. Is that a human thing? An overachiever’s thing? An Amanda thing?
A ridiculous, wow. Do I-still-have-so-much-more-growing-to-do thing?
How, after all I’ve walked away from and resisted resubscribing to, do I still go to bed and wake up feeling like I never get it all done or done right? This is my new world, after all, carefully constructed, free of weekly status meetings, performance reviews, town halls, board meetings and petty office politics.
What became clear to me in the days leading up to Esperanza is that I can no longer afford to ignore that I am the one and only perpetrator of this mayhem and misery. I may have cleared the deck of the typical corporate clowns and candidates who used to drain and diminish me, but I am the one choosing today, all on my own, to fixate on all the ways I fall short. I am not only my hardest, worst critic. I am a relentless, demanding boss.
Since being called back to Vilnius, so many of these questions have lain beside me in the middle of the night as I stared at the ceiling from a flustered state equal parts panic and jet lag. It ultimately took returning to a place I loved, assuming it would be a seamless, slam-dunk experience in taste and encounter, to recognize that I wasn’t here to coast. For longevity’s sake, I had some urgent course-correcting to do.
By the time I checked in at the front desk at Esperanza, while these questions were still darting about my restless mind, I had started to loosen up just enough to sense that they might be catch-able, tame-able and dare I say surmountable. I had started to sense that I might even, somewhere deep down inside, possess the power and wherewithal to silence and rechannel them.
I signed the credit card authorization slip and turned around to look long and hard at the lake in front of me. With a complimentary glass of kombucha in hand, I sipped in another long, deep ratifying breath. I closed my eyes. I thought about how I had come to be here, right here.
Just the week before, I had been so worked up. I had felt shunned and deceived by both Vilnius and Taste, my compass. I had wondered, until it was no longer productive to wonder anymore, why I had even come to Lithuania at all. What a demoralizing waste of money, spirit and momentum.
Then, I opened my eyes. Ah. Yes.
Lake Ungurys at Esperanza Lake Resort in Lithuania
This.
This is exactly why I had been working myself into such a lather. So that in the throes of desperation, I could pick up and carry myself right here. And in doing so, I could realize that the way out and through was far more achievable and straightforward than it was impassable or impossible.
The unlock to my confidence and success wasn’t riding myself harder or demanding more work, more structure or more balance. It was this. It was what I knew I would find and let go of amongst all this space and distance. I was going to reprogram and give myself – room.
Over the next two days, I slept like a rock at Esperanza.
Finally.
I rose early to write, took long, leisurely breakfasts and plowed through my book, Exit Interview, from one of those Adirondack chairs at the lake’s edge. I hit the gym and I sweat. I went to bed on time. When compelled, mid-thought, mid-bite or mid-sentence, I’d stop to stare at the lake or deep into the woods around me. Each time I did, I gave myself a little bit more of that room I had been craving. It was time now to recalibrate and re-steady.
And then, when my time at the lodge was up, I loaded up my backpack and returned, recharged and refortified, to my Užupis Airbnb in Vilnius.
I don’t know exactly what had changed. But something, most definitely, had.
It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t even measurable. I still didn’t have any of the answers to what I had been obsessively ruminating over. But I did make a little bit more room to let the questions that preceded those elusive answers hang out and breathe. By making room for ambiguity, I gave myself permission to think and move from a place of pure incompletion and becoming.
A place that, coincidentally, when I stepped back with a little more self-compassion and perspective, felt a whole lot like the bigger, broader journey I had embarked on nearly two years ago. And when I called to mind all the ways moving as a work-in-progress had already blessed and surprised me along that route, I knew I was headed in the right direction.
Outfitted with that more wide-open state of mind, my next stop on the journey was dinner later that evening in Vilnius. After much deliberation, I had decided to keep my on-again, off-again tasting menu reservation at one-Michelin-star Deep Roots.
Why on-again, off-again?
As lovely as the chef and waitstaff had been when I dined the week before at Vilnius’ highly acclaimed Nineteen18, something about its vibe had made me second-guess why I was eating at restaurants like this at all. Pigeon neck stuffed with pigeon liver, foam and then more foam and tiny, dainty, delicate desserts? Then there was the quiet, exacting ceremony shrouded in a hushed and stuffy seriousness.
That wasn’t how I chose to live and create. Why was it how I kept choosing to dine?
I bristled at the proximity of the Michelin experience to the pomp and circumstance of a boardroom meeting or a carefully rehearsed quarterly town hall. The rigidity of the evening’s form had left no room for drip, splash or splatter, which only reminded me further of fixed mindsets who could see nothing but chaos in change and creativity.
In all fairness, I don’t know why all this angina was surfacing so strongly after eating at Nineteen18, especially because I am always hungry to support a badass female head chef. I think it’s fair to say, though, I was unexpectedly trudging through a too-much-structure and striving-for-perfection meltdown. I also think it’s possible being asked to eat yet another version of a gastronomically dressed-up pigeon was just too much.
I really, really hate pigeon.
Whatever the reason, after that night I wasn’t having it. The next morning, I cancelled two tasting dinners at 14 Horses and Deep Roots. I didn’t want food that had been plated with tweezers anymore. I was done.
And yet, as the days passed, I knew that by adopting that hardline position, I would be acting from a fixed mindset myself, pigeonholing – how could I resist? – every future table against this one angst-ridden outlier. So after a series of unignorable nudges from Taste, my compass, I rebooked Deep Roots.
Dinner there was the meal I had been waiting for.
The service, food and wine at Deep Roots were a cathartic and phenomenal trifecta: thoughtful and tender, attention-grabbing and inspiring. All night long, plates arrived behind poignant storytelling and unpredictable bursts of humor and levity. I realized the meal had also served up something I hadn’t had any of since dining in Vilnius.
Fun.
Beyond that, I can’t remember ever taking so many pictures of finished, empty plates, because what was left behind looked just as much like a work of art as what the chef had plated. A white porcelain bowl smeared in bright magenta sour cherry sauce or chartreuse green and bright yellow polka-dotted oil and water left over from a to-die-for helping of Lithuanian crudo.
This had been dining in a most joyful state of flow. Throughout the evening, I found myself leaning in and smiling whenever the server approached my table. She always had something witty or cheeky to say. Just thinking about her now, I can’t help but warm at the memory of that dinner and grin from ear to ear.
Her timing and bedside manner were truly genuine and quite impeccable. Just as I was silently scolding myself for running out of wine before my last dish was gone, she magically showed up to top me off with a little bit more red to get me through the ambitious Deep Roots finale: a four-cut meat course.
The Four-Cut Meat Course at Deep Roots in Vilnius, Lithuania
I laughed a lot, too, especially when I realized the man who had greeted me in a most endearing, unassuming little way with a welcome shot of Lithuanian moonshine was, in fact, the head chef himself. He dropped by my table one other time to shyly and clumsily deposit a tic-tac-toe cheese-and-cracker board in front of me. He mumbled something unintelligible but silly in good humor before skirting off.
My favorite part of that exchange?
A few shreds of cheese spilled out from the stacked crackers onto the grid of the wooden tray. And when they did, I found inside that moment, inside that dining room, exactly what I had been looking for.
A reason to choose and taste imperfection.
The Cheese and Cracker Board at Deep Roots in Vilnius, Lithuania
