Sometimes under late afternoons, you'll find my mom and I at the dinner table, making wontons. On the table sits two packs of wonton skins, a bowl of meat filling, and a water dish. We fall into our roles - she prepares the filling, I do the wrapping. Plop, wrap, fold, and repeat.
Sounds nice and peaceful, right?
Wrong. My dumplings were disasters. Sometimes my dad would join us, and immediately the evidence would line up on our wooden cutting board - his perfect pleats next to my shriveled, lopsided attempts.
"It's just my style," I'd say. Ha. We all knew the truth—I couldn’t wrap them well even if I tried.
Or could I? One afternoon I had a thought: what if I tried to make each dumpling better than the last? I slowed down and tried paying attention to more details - how the filling should take up exactly half the rectangle after the first fold, how my index fingers needed to form a precise trapezoid when pressing down on the filling, how the final fold was a delicate balance between being tight at the top to hide the filling, and loose at the bottom to create an inviting shape. Each dumpling became an experiment. Adjust the filling position. Shift the folding angle. Plop, wrap, fold, think, and repeat.
"Wow, these look good!" My mom's voice broke my focus. I looked up from my hands to the cutting board and saw my efforts laid out - a gradient of improvement from the first dumpling to the last.
We tend to think about gradual improvement like it's some slow, grinding process. But sometimes it's just twenty minutes of paying attention, actually stopping to reflect, and making each dumpling a little better than the last.