Do It Anyway

 

painted warp scarf

One thing about writing out one's memories is that you start remembering a lot of stuff you had 'forgotten'.

Thinking about my career a lot these days.  Remembering the people who helped me along the way.  The lessons that were dropped at my feet.  The way some lives intersect, sometimes randomly.  Sometimes, almost as though there is such a thing as 'destiny'.

Human beings tend to search for meaning in our lives.  Society tends to set up expectations and then we think that every single person is going to get the same things: win the lottery, stay young, beautiful, healthy forever, never need something we can't afford.  We've been told over and over again that we need to get a good job and if we don't get one, it's our fault.  That we need to follow the societal 'norms' in order to be accepted, to fit in, to be successful.  To be happy.

Wallis Simpson is said to have coined the phrase 'you can never be too rich or too thin'.  Too many of us get swept up in trying to be young forever, skinny and richer than Croesus.

I chose a different path.  I was never 'beautiful' in the way society meant it.  I was too tall.  Too quiet.  Too much a dreamer and a thinker.  I'd rather stay home and read a book than party hardy all night long.

When I reached adulthood, I found myself deeply dissatisfied with the way society was telling me to live my life.  I wasn't finding much meaning in parties, dieting, scrambling after more, more, more.

Still, my decision to become a weaver as my profession, my career, took a lot of people off guard.  I don't know what my father thought about it.  By the time I decided that was what I wanted to do, he was too sick and too focused on staying alive for one more day.  But I'm quite sure that once he died he understood.

I didn't have any illusions about what I was doing.  It was going to take hard work.  I mean hard, physically, as well as in every other respect.  Weaving at the level I did for most of my life is hard labour.  Another weaver, doing much the same thing, described it as like digging ditches, but with with yarn.

Few people I knew were treating weaving as a full time job and I struggled to do everything that needed doing.  Because running a business isn't just about making a product.  It's all the other stuff that goes along with running a business.  It all takes time, energy and mental gymnastics.  The weaving, regardless of how it was physically, was actually the easy part.

For someone who prefers to feel 'secure', I deliberately chose a profession that was anything BUT secure.  An injury or illness could knock me out for weeks or months, unless I continued, injured/sick (which I did more than once).  

Watching the money go out, out, out and dribble in was scary.  I got really good at pinching pennies and nickels.  Making do, doing without, while I watched others take fancy holidays and buy new wardrobes, vehicles, nice big houses.

We have lived in the same house we purchased in 1975.  It has been a challenge running a business out of this house.  It was bigger than our first house, but far smaller than houses are now.  Walk in closet?   Those were for rich folk.  We have one 1970s standard clothes closet and both of us use it.  The bathroom is 'tiny', the kitchen 'efficient'.  

We kept our wants modest, and focused on what we truly needed - and let go of the rest.

By a fluke of chance, we are 'comfortable' enough now.  But I can never assume that this level of security will last.

I have a history of feeling the fear and doing it anyway, and having it work out well enough.  That doesn't mean I can be casual with my financial resources.  And it doesn't mean I can give everything away.  My 'donations' are targeted and carefully budgeted.  But I have 'enough' right now - enough I can share, to a certain extent.  So, I do.

Over the past few years I've written and self-published some books.  And now I'm working on another.

I read through the ms this morning and while I'm still experiencing a certain level of 'fear' (will people buy it?  Will they like it?) I'm going to do it anyway.

I may fall flat on my face (metaphorically speaking), but somehow it seems important that I get the stories in this book 'out there'.

Which could be pure delusion on my part!  

But my whole career was considered delusional by some.  And yet, here I am.

We don't 'find' meaning for our lives.  We *make* it.

In the end I have no idea if I made the 'right' choice.  But it was the choice I made, and as I look back, I don't regret it.  Even though it was difficult.  Even though it was hard.