Learning With Our Hands

Wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.

—Proverbs 2:10

One winter I went to a week-long culinary boot camp at The Chopping Block, a recreational cooking school in the city. What I learned there is that we learn by doing. We learn with our hands and our noses. We learn by tasting the stock, feeling the hum of the knife back and forth, listening for the sounds of hot oil. We roll an omelet out of a pan wrong five times in a row, and then the sixth time, the whole group cheers because one of us made one perfect omelet.

Almost everything I know in the world, I learned from novels, memoirs, and stories. I could practically draw you a map of Milan, Rome, or Venice, even though I’ve never been to any of them. I’ve read about how to make the perfect Old Fashioned, tend a rose garden, butterfly a pork loin.

But then you find yourself standing at a bar or kneeling in the dirt or holding a very sharp chef’s knife, and you realize all at once that it doesn’t matter what you’ve read or seen or think you know. You learn it, really learn it, with your hands. With your fingers and your knife, your nose and your ears, your tongue and your muscle memory, learning as you go.