The winter months tend to be the time I clean up from the post-holiday rush, prepare my taxes, order new supplies, and come up with the new year’s business plan. It is also the time that I use to experiment and try new things.
For some reason this year has been more difficult to do the latter & I am not sure why. It could be that other areas of my personal life are sapping my energy, for instance, I am a first year coach for my son’s Odyssey of the Mind team.
I think my bigger fear, and probably any artist’s fear is that I have gone stale. I think we artists, regardless of our genre, ask “have I lost my ability to create?” At certain times during the year I get so into production mode that “playing” just needs to take a back seat. It is sometimes hard for me to switch gears.
I need to remember that it is okay to fail. I need to remember that I will ruin pieces and have kiln mishaps on the way to learning & discovering something new.
Yet I can be resistant to allowing that failure to happen. I wonder if it is the business person in me that sees each piece of unusable glass as overhead waste. I wonder if it is the organized, Type-A part of my personality that just won’t let go. I wonder if it is a sense of panic of whether I’ll have enough time for “production” if I spend too much time dilly-dallying & being wasteful.
And yet, I know that I MUST continue to press forward, and remind myself that failure it okay. Children don’t think about failing, they just create and play and “run” with whatever they produce.
And so today, in the spirit of a child, I have forced myself to do the same. I have allowed myself to set aside some glass and some time and just “play” regardless of what the outcome will be. Yes, I am a bit anxious because one piece of glass is just gorgeous. But today I hope that the beautiful glass that I put into the cocoon of the kiln will tranform itself into something even more beautiful and previously unimaginable.
Here’s to butterflies and tomorrow.