Easy

 

If it was 'easy' everyone would be doing it.  

And that's pretty much it, isn't it?  But sometimes we do things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.  (Yes, I'm channeling JFK.)

Human beings do tend to love a puzzle.  Well, some of us do.  We enjoy the challenge of thinking up some new thing, then seeing if it will work.  Sometimes we do things and wonder if it could be done another way, maybe a way that is less difficult.

Of course not everyone likes this sort of challenge, but they like the easier way.  To have the 'hard' bits worked out for them.  To have some assurance that their effort will be rewarded with some level of success.

When I was a kid I hated making mistakes in my knitting and my mom would encourage me to try again by ripping out what I'd done.   She didn't do that to punish me - I asked her to do it.  I could face the re-doing but not the 'destruction' of what I had done.  Fortunately she understood that the few minutes of her ripping out my work was actually helping me and as I got older it became easier for me to accept that my effort wasn't up to snuff and start over again without needing her to rip it out for me.

This lesson served me well when I began weaving.  I learned how to let go of something that wasn't working out, up to and including *throwing away* the 'failed' effort.  I had learned to accept that I needed to try again, but do it based on what I had learned in that first effort.

So it is with teaching.  As I craft the Power Point lectures, I am drawing on decades of experience doing presentations to groups of people.  But now I have to format them for on line delivery.  This has proved challenging in many ways.  But so far the feedback has been positive.

Now I am once again gearing up to expand my on line presentations.  It isn't that I have never done it before - the DVDs I did for (now) Handwoven/Long Thread Media were done a number of years ago.  2014 if I remember correctly.

So again, I am taking what I learned from doing those and applying those lessons to what I want to do now.

And no, it isn't easy.  I know a lot of weaving teachers, many of them forging ahead with classes on line.  When you are producing classes for a very small niche market, it's important to put out good information with production values as high as you can.  For me, this becomes too great a challenge to do it on my own so I am working with a team.  We are still working out logistics, but I'm optimistic enough to believe that together we can do this.

During the covid times we all had to practice being flexible and explore new options.  And while the end result may show nothing of the effort to make a good on line class, believe me when I say that good production values come from a team approach.  Because making a good 'video' requires experienced and talented behind the scenes expertise - from lighting/sound, to camera, to wardrobe and makeup, to post production.

My job is the content.  So I'm buying yarn appropriate to the topic(s) and exploring the nature of these new-to-me yarns.  It is being done under a fairly tight deadline, in the face of covid and currently something like 250 wildfires in the province.  

But in the end?  The goal is to make it look effortless.  And easy.

And I think about my father who always warned to be careful of anything someone made look easy.  Because it probably wasn't.