creating

Keep on failing

October 9, 2020

I spent hours yesterday evening starting this jumper and then before bed, I unravelled it all. I know where I went wrong, and expected it to be difficult as this is teaching me a number of techniques I haven’t used before. I’ve learned to build a few false starts into a new project like this so I don’t get too disappointed.
Failure is such an important part of creation, it allows us to ask questions without knowing what the answers will be, it gives us the space to learn what we really don’t want to do, and it teaches us to have great respect for the things that do go right. To fail doesn’t mean to stop, that is a choice we make. In the past I’ve been almost pathological about not failing – I would work my arse off to make a project fly, sometimes over-promising in the process so that I had already set myself up to fail because nobody could deliver what I’d said within that timeframe when also juggling endless other projects. Sometimes, even when I’d created something truly special all I could see (and all I was adamant everyone else would talk about) was that extra hurdle I’d set and fell at that nobody asked for in the first place.
I’m getting better at dealing with this, with managing my own expectations and not falling down that hell-hole of disappointment afterwards.
Creating has been the absolute best process for me to deal with all of this. I write, cook, knit, whatever, some of it is amazing, some of it needs work, I take what lessons I can from it and continue to reach for the sunlight of inspiration that is our bright and beautiful world.
Where writing’s concerned, I put my entire heart and soul into every piece so that it is given the best chance to grow, but conversely I’ve learned to let go of things much earlier on in the creative process. Sometimes the lesson has already been unearthed during the creating so the final result’s success is not necessarily what I was looking for anyway.
And then, out of all the seeds of creative potential I scatter, one or two will take root and I have learned to attune myself to this subtle shift in the self so that I can focus on making the space for this new thought to grow and blossom.

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