A Meditation on Pizza Dough

I don't have a picture of me making pizza dough - good thing as it would be horrendous. Maybe I'll add one later when this attempt at pizza is done. It's been a long time since I've made pizza - and this current attempt is reminding me of the first time I made a pie crust and it came out shaped like the state of Alaska. The upside of this is that now I make a really killer pie crust.
In the meantime, I am finding this attempt at pizza a little meditative. I am not a good meditator kind of person. Generally, I fall asleep. I love savasana at the end of a yoga class (which I think is supposed to be meditative) but generally I doze during it. I do suspect that what other people do when mediating is what I do in the bathtub when I get in and the water is just the right kind of hot and I can let my body relax and I can just be - I don't have to think about anything. Consequently, the bathtub is where I have some really good ideas.
This pizza attempt is meditative in a different way. It is not like the bathtub in that making pizza dough is what I want to do at the end of a long day. But it is the opportunity to notice my mind and the kinds of things I do. Pizza dough - it turns out - is like a lot of things that end up serving as a kind a mirror in life.
I started to get my dough close to the size it needed to be for my pan and then it went all wonky. I folded it all up and let it rest - like the cookbook said. During the dough's rest (Dough, like babies and the best of us, need naps and/or time outs) I reread the cookbook's instructions. It said not to worry about tears in the dough or about getting the dough perfect - because it could all be fixed and patched up once it got squeezed into the pan. I realized I was doing with my dough what I tend to do in my life: focus on getting it perfect - or so perfect - that I end up sabotaging my efforts. I of course didn't realize I was doing this at the time. Mostly I was thinking about my sister-in-law who I now think is perfect because she routinely makes a variety of pizza doughs with various kinds of flour depending on the various gluten intolerances in the family. And she does it with a baby crawling circles around her feet.
But this is something else I do - compare myself to people who I think are perfect and use it as a hammer in the litany of all the ways I fall up short. I am the A student in life who writes C papers - or the person who doesn't end up doing things because I think my first attempt should be awesome and I end up intimidating myself.
Who knew this all was inside a ball of dough. Now all I have left to do is get into action - on a novel, a collage book, blog postings, picture taking etc etc etc. And hope that I don't use overwhelm as the new scapegoat for getting me off the hook for things.