There are things in life that just make sense for some people. Tossing a ball into a basket. Crunching numbers in columns. Motivating people. Making music. Scaling rock walls. Getting a rowdy bunch of students to settle down.

And you can tell when someone is doing “their thing.” There is a sense of ease and grace about them…and they just seem to exist in this perfect rhythm. And it’s like this task, whatever it is, makes them feel most at home. It makes sense.

I bake with kids.

It’s weird and doesn’t always go smoothly. Over the past few years, I’ve lost eggs to floors and messed up recipes and guided students to bake things that they wound up hating. But that doesn’t change it for me. Given a choice, I will still bake with kids over just about anything else.

Translating that to the outdoors has been challenging. I wasn’t even sure I should try…fire scares me. But I couldn’t just walk away from this opportunity to do the thing that I love most because I was scared.

Each time I taught outdoor cooking, I got a little bolder. I started by using a pre-made mix for johnny cakes. From there, I did some research and Frankenstein-ed a “from scratch” recipe. And with every group, we got better at building and tending our fire.

Last week, we tried something completely new – pumpkin scones. I tweaked a “traditional” recipe to make it a little more outdoor-friendly. This recipe let us have conversations about kitchen chemistry and really get our hands into the food that we were preparing. And kids got to smell pumpkin (yuck!).

And I was entirely in my element. Over the past couple of months, there have been plenty of moments where I have felt joy and enthusiasm and even small tidbits of pride in the work. But it’s all been so foreign and new that it rarely feels “comfortable.”

Cooking scones over an open fire on a beach…it makes sense.