FROM SCRATCH
To bake something from scratch means to start with the basic raw ingredients rather than relying on boxed mixes and such.
The term “from scratch” comes from racing and from sports like wrestling, referring to a literal “scratch,” a mark, drawn in the dirt as a starting line. To start from scratch meant that nobody got a head start.
Every participant begins at the same point. Which doesn’t mean everybody begins with the same resources, skills, life lessons, advantages, history, and troubles. Just that we all begin here and now, with this, whatever it is.
I encountered the idiom this week while looking up alternative phrases for “blank slate.” From scratch was listed as a synonym. I was thinking about the idea of approaching the future as a wide-open space of unobstructed possibilities. Wondering about the degree to which I might clear the page and step lightly into a new day, unencumbered, free from the baggage of habit and conditioning and self-imposed limitations.
Ernest Holmes beautifully said, “Principle is not bound by precedent.” Meaning that what has come before doesn’t have to circumscribe what might be. We haven’t yet experienced a world of perfect Harmony and Beauty and Justice, it is true. But this doesn’t mean that the future can’t bloom these principles forth in fresh array. Likewise, all the ways I’ve known myself — I’m this but not that, skilled here but not there, riddled with these problems and stuck with these coping strategies — these preconceptions don’t have to define who and how I can be going forward, unless I let them.
So I was meditating on the encouraging and liberating idea of blank slates and clear pages, the tabula rasa of every unprecedented moment. The past is over and done. We can leave it behind and make all things new.
When it dawned on me that from scratch doesn’t really mean starting from nothing. It means starting with this, with these ingredients.
Sure, we can try not to over-rely on the Duncan Hines premix; but it’s not like our eggs, flour, sugar, oil, and vanilla appear out of nowhere. They’ve got the whole of time and space behind them, the history of the universe coming through them. Travis once proclaimed: “Everything that doesn’t come out of a drive-through window is home-made.” Anything we’re going to create begins with the raw materials we’ve already go — including who and how we already are.
Tying up the wrestling/racing metaphor… We start from this scratch, right here and now, as it is and isn’t, as we are and aren’t. Each of us a participant, bringing what we’ve got. Ready, set, go.
I think this, too, can be extremely freeing. The future is a blank slate, but we needn’t be. We don’t have to clear or clean or perfect or purify ourselves before stepping into it.
- In fact, the more we simply allow ourselves fully to be who we already are, the less we saddle the future with hangups about who we think we ought to be.
- The more we accept the life we’ve experienced up to this point, the less likely we are to project our regrets and resentments and unhealed wounds onto this new day.
- The more we can embrace our story as precisely what was necessary for us to reach this moment of choice, the less likely it is that preemptive fears of our own inadequacies or the precedent of injustice will crowd out the glorious possibilities before us.
I don’t know who first said this — it’s been printed on aprons and potholders and framed on the walls of cookie shops around the country — “Life’s a batch, and then you bake.” Terrible and silly. But still, not a bad motto.
The Universe has served up quite a batch, thus far, to each one of us. A mixed batch, to be sure, of burned crusts, soggy bottoms, chewy goodness, and a few blue-ribbon recipes. I’ve learned a lot, grown a lot, been heartbroken, fallen down, and fallen in love. (I’m picturing us covered with flour, batter dripping from the ceiling, and a sink full of every mixing bowl.) All that has brought us to this assemblage of ingredients — me, you, us, nature, art, service, belonging, opportunities, sweetness, bitterness, ideas, hopes, and wisdom…
Let’s bake something, out of all of it, from scratch.
I can’t wait to be with you this Sunday, March 1, 10:00am at q-Staff Theatre. With special music by Bert Dalton and Patty Stephens! XO, Drew
©2026 Drew Groves
