Summer at Layla
This past summer, I worked at a bakery in London. In the bakery, the day started long before sunrise. As soon as I arrived, I’d dive into the rhythm of the work – turning on the ovens, tipping out brioche dough to shape cardamom buns, meticulously garnishing pastries with carefully sliced fresh fruit. It was a far cry from my typical mornings of the past three years at Yale where my hands would normally be typing on my laptop instead of shaping a tray of baguettes.
At Yale, the challenges are mostly mental – struggling to keep up with deadlines, attending club meetings, navigating the often puzzling social dynamics – it often feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day. In the bakery, the challenges were immediate and physical: the early mornings that left me bone-tired, the satisfaction of producing something with my hands and the immediate devastation upon realizing I had forgotten to add salt to a dough, rendering the 15 loaves of bread I was in charge of as unusable.
The bakery taught me a kind of patience that doesn’t really exist on campus. There, it wasn’t enough to rush or cram for the sake of finishing. Rushing a dough would ruin it, force it into something dense and lifeless. I learned to read the subtle signs of readiness – the slight bounce of proofed dough, the way a kneaded batch should feel in my hands. These tasks required a sense of presence, an immersion I rarely found in the library, where hours seemed to melt away. At Yale, each paper, each exam feels like a stepping stone toward a more distant goal: graduation, a career. The rewards, though fulfilling, feel abstract, almost delayed. But in the bakery, there was immediate satisfaction, an instant reminder of my efforts. I’d place a tray of pastries into the oven and, in minutes, watch them change. Each task had an end, a result I could hold, taste, or see – a product of labor and time that felt deeply satisfying.
Yet, the bakery demanded resilience, too. There were no retakes, no “undo” buttons like with essays. A dough left to rise too long meant starting over. And each misstep felt personal. One morning, I accidentally forgot to egg wash croissants. It was a simple mistake, but in the bakery’s early morning quiet, it felt enormous, as though I had let the whole team down. There, my mistakes were tangible, visible; at Yale, an error might be hidden away in a grade or buried in an email, but in the bakery, it was impossible to escape. And maybe that was the biggest difference: the immediacy. At school, I can mull over ideas for weeks, polish thoughts on paper, revisit and revise. In the bakery, everything was here and now, each loaf and pastry a reminder to be present because each moment counted. It was a lesson in humility, too – knowing that by the end of the day, my work would be eaten, the evidence of my efforts gone, and tomorrow, I’d begin again from scratch. But maybe that’s what made each day feel worth it.
