OK

The movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel had this quote running through it.

The optimism of the characters, the determination to see a dream come to reality, resonated with me. 

Recently I told someone that I had made a career out of mining for the silver linings in clouds.  No, I'm not 100% Pollyanna.  I have my 'bad' days.  Days when I'm tired of digging.  Tired of scraping away at dross to find the silver.

It's very easy these days to rely on cliches but cliches are how many of us get through our days.

I well remember that time in grade five.  It was in deep winter.  The day was grey and gloomy.  It was cold and snowy.   I didn't know it at the time but I have multiple allergies and I now recognize how I was feeling was another allergic reaction - headache, weary, low energy, just yukky all over.

I stood at the window looking out at the ice fog hanging in the air, snow piled high, jack frost decorating the glass and slowly coming to the realization that in my life I was going to have to work hard for anything I wanted.  I even remember that inner voice telling me that nothing was going to be handed to me on a silver platter. 

It was a sobering moment.  I had - at that point - to either accept that this was going to be the way my life went and just get on with it - or be angry about it.

Anger takes too much energy and I didn't have any.  So I decided then and there, that morning, to just get on with it. 

And so I have done.  Choosing weaving as a career was choosing to work hard, physically and emotionally.  Nothing like a life of expressing one's creativity to bring on the opinions of others, some of which are far from flattering.  I had to learn how to cope with negative feedback.

Nothing like choosing a 'job' without a steady paycheque to make navigating the daily expenses of living and running a business challenging.

Nothing like choosing a lifestyle that insisted on flexibility to learn how to change what you are doing, sometimes mid-stream, sometimes abandoning a line of endeavour and just get on with the next thing.  Learning how to cut my losses.

With a business plan of 'I think a person could make fabric and sell it', I can't say I was particularly intelligent about making that decision.  On the other hand, I had a background that made it possible - just - to jump in and start to do it.

A childhood of physical activity - ballet, track and field - meant good body awareness.  An ability to self assess and determine how to change my movements to be more ergonomic, therefore more efficient.

That fateful decision as an 11 year old to accept that I would, I could, work hard.  And do it willingly.

The decision to earn an income gave me the strength to ignore what other people thought of what I was doing and the equipment I was doing it on and keep an eye on my personal goals - selling my textiles.

Over the years I kept changing things as things either worked - or didn't.  A 'failure' wasn't the 'end' because it wasn't OK - yet.  So I just kept going.

Over the years my goals changed somewhat.  I had always taught, even though I wasn't trained as a teacher.  My mother was a good intuitive teacher then, when I was 16, she enrolled in Early Childhood Education, and by reading and helping proof read her papers, I learned vicariously, too.

As I taught, I also learned about how people learned and was able to fine tune my approach to conveying information.  And dealing with students.

I'd always loved reading and writing, fancied myself a bit of a poet as a teen.  Took English 101 and Creative Writing only to realize that I really wasn't a fiction writer. 

All of that was good practice as I developed workshop handouts, then dabbled in writing articles for magazines.

Not all of my articles were accepted, so I learned to deal with rejection.  To realize that it was the article that had been rejected, not me, personally.  And move on to the next.

I learned to juggle multiple streams of income, multiple deadlines.  In high school I had taken Law 11 and Office Practices, so I knew what a cheque was, what constituted a contract, how to keep a double entry ledger and read a financial report.  All of which was necessary to the running of a business.

All of this is to say - it's absolutely normal to have a 'bad' day.  It's ok to feel down because you are in the middle of the hard slog of a big project. 

On those days I remind myself of the Winston Churchill quote on my fridge:  When you are going through hell...keep going. 

It's not the end - yet.

Currently reading Human Face by Aline Templeton