Goat Trails

 

This morning Facebook showed me a memory from six years ago when I was preparing for a workshop with a guild.  It showed the Leclerc with a warp beamed but waiting for threading and baggies with weaving drafts and yarns to be used for the workshop warps all laid out all over the floor.  There was about 15" of walkway between those and the shelving unit on the other side.

I stopped letting students use their own yarns when I did a couple of workshop on wet finishing, specified that people needed to use wool that would full and have a couple show up with their looms all dressed with acrylic.  So much for experiencing fulling.  :(

It just became a whole lot easier for me to provide the yarns (for an additional materials fee) and make sure the students experienced the workshop in the way that *I* intended.

But it was an enormous amount of work.  

At the time I was also weaving for production, planning for upcoming shows to sell my work, writing articles to submit for publication.  My studio was crammed wall to wall with...stuff...and my studio had a couple of goat trails through it.  It was a constant shuffling of bins, boxes, and equipment as I juggled the deadlines and dealt with the logistics of it all.

Most of this type of work is completely invisible to others - unless you've done it (or something very similar).  

In addition there was the constant self-promotion and fielding questions, setting up teaching tours (always cheaper for two or three guilds to share my travel costs), and so on.

Over the years I designed and made weaving kits, self-published booklets with woven samples in addition to the two 'real' books I did, made a CD in a very early effort to produce digital 'workshops'.

And I did all this - and more - for 4 decades.

When I 'retired' I wanted less stress in my life.  Getting rid of travelling to teach was a no-brainer.  That sliced a big chunk of mental scrambling out of my life.  No more being a travel agent, a booking agent, ordering in yarns for teaching, being a photocopy centre, assembling 'kits' for workshops and then mailing them out to the workshop organizers.  Then making sure I collected the material fee when I got there if the guild hadn't done it for me.

Constantly promoting myself.  Which, given I'm essentially an introvert, wasn't an easy thing for me to do.  Still isn't, honestly

So now I'm 'retired' - for certain values of - and I have to say...I don't miss the goat trails.  I don't miss the constant scramble of looming (pun intended) deadlines.  The pressure to be 'on' all the time.  The dark o'clock flights.  The adjusting to different time zones.

But I'm not dead yet, and I do still have goals.  So while I AM 'retired' it's the craft fair circuit and travelling to teach that I've officially retired from.  I'm finding that I can manage - just - to develop online content, with the very talented team at SOS.  

So even though there are still challenges (buying a new laptop and trying to get it set up before the first lecture on May 4) I am managing.  Mostly.

I am officially a senior citizen, have been for a while.  I ride the health roller coaster, even if I don't want to, because I still feel the need to share my knowledge with anyone who wants to know what I know.  Or what I *think* I know.  Because I'm still learning.  The deeper I dig, the more I understand that I don't know, *can't* know, everything.

And that is just fine by me.  It's why I drag myself from my bed each morning.  Because I never know what the day will bring, and what I will learn.

And I really don't miss the goat trails.

Reading the latest book by Donna Leon, Give Unto Others