Reminders and Discoveries

So, throughout this new version of the blog I have been talking about how much you are your business and facing up to some of my failures. That is bound to continue. But yesterday, I went out to the forge and I was reminded of something. In the wake of beginning to try to chase my dream, in the face of some things coming to pass that I could not forsee which led me down the path to my goals, I have lost sight of something. I have lost sight of the love and the passion for what I do. Yesterday in the heat and the noise and working through trying to fix yet another error I checked in with myself for the first time in a long time and I found the joy again.

My head was still filled with the desire to please, the fear of failure, the proof of failure. The feeling of being lost in an unfamiliar landscape and not having a sense of direction in my new life was still there, if not so overwhelming. There was still the frustration of every stroke that was not just so, the criticism chorus running in the back of my head. The empty wasteland of this object just not looking like it had in my head, and veering farther and farther from my hopes...

But there was an undercurrent that I had stopped noticing beneath all of that at the quiet core of my being. Beyond the swearing at the scale burns and feeling sloppy because the heat made me tired before I began there was something else. When I noticed it, it helped me to keep going long after I felt I was being useful, and to get further into the project than I'd expected.

There was a deep well of calm and contentment there. There was a joy at the rhythm of the hammer that I feared I had lost. There was a quiet joy in forming the shapes from something else.

And in those moments I realized that I had not lost my love. I had not wasted time and money on tools and plugging away at something I was now afraid to do. All of this was not a mistake. All the effort that I, (and several other people!), had put in to making me a space to do this thing I love but have been avoiding – it was not a mistake.

I have been letting the fear get in the way. I have been allowing what skill I have to languish and rust. I have been avoiding something that brings me peace and contentment and joy because I have been chasing something that is not mine. I have been chasing other peoples ideas of what this is for me. I have been trailing after things I have seen others doing successfully and failing at them miserably. I should know better than this. But I forget. I get lost in the world of expectations and trapped in my own cycles of making do for fear of not doing. And the irony is, those very attempts have had me doing exactly that – Nothing.

I hang around with a lot of really amazing people who all excel at what they do. As one of them likes to point out – everyone is at one end of the bell curve, the top end. This skews my judgement, at the very least, and my expectations. It has also created a streak in which I wanted to try to “keep up with the Joneses” which is utterly unrealistic. And it has taken me away from what I do best, which is making my own path through things rather than following any of those set out by others. As skillfully as they may be laid out, I am someone who learns best by stepping off the path and poking under the undergrowth to see how life is lived there and what I can learn from it. Not that there aren't things to be learned on the path too, and sometimes they are the same lessons...but I often think I speak a different language. I don't get the nuance that leads to understanding undercurrents and big picture stuff unless I have sniffed around on my own.

So, I approached this project from entirely the wrong angle. I was trying to play a game for which I didn't know the rules or how to use the equipment. I didn't even know which field I was supposed to play on. Truth is, I think I was trying to impress people. I couldn't have failed harder at that if I'd set out to do just that.

So now, on some level, I am starting again. Oh, no – I'm not restarting the whole project, as much as I've thought of that numerous times, starting again from scratch now that I have the glass and the light. As much as I think it might yield a better result the truth is I now know it would put the project back by such a huge amount of time (because I have a slightly more realistic view of my real schedule) that it would just be the wrong thing to do. But I am starting again in terms of seeing the project through my own lens, and walking my own path to complete it. I am starting again with the comfort of having remembered that this is actually being made with love and care and as a discovery process.

I think I am starting again from the other side of the wall I built between me and it.

I do what I do because I love what I do. That has always been how I've worked, but sometimes I try to convince myself of that love rather than just reaching in and feeling it, and that tends to be when everything goes horribly wrong.

My work may or may not have merit in the wider world, but as long as it has merit to me I am doing the right thing. So here's to a new chapter of lessons born of failures as well as those born of success.