I have found “giving up” to be really hard work and terribly difficult to achieve.
I am not making light of the desire, just the opposite. The desire is often very intense, but giving up seems to simply be much harder than finding joy or purpose. When joy seems elusive, I look for purpose. Purpose usually leads me to joy.
From my earliest days of quilting, I have been drawn to star blocks. Whether created by using half-square triangles or diamonds, they never fail to entice me. However as far as ease of construction goes, they have caused me frustration. Maintaining each and every point on a star is not the easiest of tasks, especially when in a hurry to see the project finished. Switching to a slower process like English Paper Piecing, much like with foundation piecing, offers a way to get precision with less frustration. In the past, I have dabbled with foundation piecing as a way to get my star blocks precise, but while I did enjoy the process, it never clicked for me like EPP has. Maybe my new found love of EPP has a great deal to do with my current need to slow down just a bit.
During periods of life when the future is more unsure than what we have come to expect, or when we feel like we are standing on shaky ground, slow-crafting has the potential to calm our mind. While finished objects and busy hands often motivate the hand-crafting world, many crafts can be done with speed without the loss of accuracy. EPP, like other hand sewing crafts, requires focus, even when the skill is performed by the hands of a master. Every stitch is placed in just the right spot to create strength, yet small enough to seemingly disappear when the block is finished. Over time, rhythmic precision develops, but focus is still required.
Working with an EPP block offers the crafter a choice –
As hand-crafters, we often choose our patterns and projects with these two choices in mind. It is likely the reason why we keep so many projects going at the same time. We have projects that fit for both of the choices above, so we can easily pick one based of the need of the moment.
Right now, my need has me picking a project that keeps me focused on my hands rather than focused things outside my control. In truth, I’m not at all surprised I have gravitated to so many star blocks as I plan out the EPP quilt. Whether wishing on a star, or simply taking in their sparkling beauty, star gazing, much like slow-crafting can quiet the mind during troubled times.
Change is unavoidable and sometimes very painful. It can also open us to opportunities we may otherwise never have seen had the change not occurred. However change, especially when it is a mighty life change, can bring on a sense of loss, even a sense of mourning for that which we had or for whom we were before the change occurred.
Mourning a loss is never an easy process, and it is seldom a speedy one. Permitting oneself the time and space to mourn is not merely important, it is vital.
Simple steps each day can help us through both the change and the loss we might feel because of the change, but sometimes even simple steps can feel overwhelming.
Sometimes we need the quiet that solitude provides us. Sometimes we need space – the space to process, to mourn, and to adjust. Other times we need companionship.
One of life’s greatest lessons is learning how to move each day – physically and mentally move each and every day. When we stop moving, we stop life.
Sometimes, no matter how strong willed we are, we need help moving. Just like when we seek physical therapy after an injury or severe illness has made our body struggle, we may need to seek help when it is our mental or spiritual health that is struggling. Seeking help and acquiring help may also require us to experience more change, but this change might be one of the most valuable aids to helping us through the bigger life change which is causing us so much struggle.
We must find a way to keep on keeping on. To keep on living, and to keep on looking for those opportunities that now might be more clearly seen because of a mighty life change.
I will vlog again, and probably sooner than later. This is just breathing time.
What do we seek on this journey or from this experience? Taking time to ask this question of ourselves affords us the opportunity to understand the answer despite any excitement or anxiety we might feel.
Do we hope to learn something? Connect with someone? Are we planning to challenge ourselves, or are we simply hoping to embrace the joy of the experience? Maybe there is a bit of all of this in our plans. However, it is not just the meandering, spur-of-the-moment journey that includes unforeseen excitement or anxiety. We can become frustrated or even lose our way if we have not taken the time to understand what we are seeking.
When this thought first began swirling around my head, I was contemplating the way personal relationships can devolve. A brief conversation with a stranger had left me troubled. The stranger had conveyed how difficult they were struggling now that they were the guardian of their young grandchild. Their struggle was one of lost hope, as much as one of real challenge. Their expectations of this new, full-time relationship was fraught with the dread of knowing life was going to be forever changed, and was going to be quite difficult due to the child’s very specific struggles.
I was troubled by the lack of hope the stranger shared. Many hours later, this thought came to mind.
What do we seek in our personal relationships? What do we hope to learn or experience?
While we may not be able to change the specific elements of human existence that make life hard, sometimes so hard we struggle to see a way forward, we are able to reimagine our expectations. Sometimes this can be achieved by simply identifying what it is we truly seek from the situation or the relationship. Often we are counseled to changed our perspective, but first we might be wise in understanding what it is we seek. From that understanding, our perspective, or in other words, our vantage point might become clear. We might even discover that our frustration is not from the challenges we face in this new journey, but simply from having become lost in the fog before reaching the summit.
Your identity and worth do not hinge on your service to others or the work you do. Your service and work are the reflection of your identity and your worth.
Regardless of whatever caused the need to heal, learning that it is okay to laugh even as the healing continues is an important lesson. Laughing can be a way to cope and a way to reconnect with joy. As long as there is empathy, and there is no malice, laughter can be just the medicine our bodies and minds need.
In a world where we are becoming more conscientious of how our actions affect those around us, we need to pause and consider how laughter can be a harm rather than a help. Empathy helps us recognize that even with the absence of malice, laughter can hurt rather than heal.
I spend a good deal of time laughing through my struggles, especially in my little videos/vlogs. I have had time to face and process my body’s rebellion over the last few decades. I have cried my tears, gnashed my teeth, and shouted my anger. I allow myself to acknowledge frustration rather than bottle it up like I did for so long. My family can attest to the fact that I suffer in relative silence when I am in physical pain, but I am a mess when I have a head cold – a completely sad mess. I can laugh at how ridiculous I behave when the sniffles prove to be from a virus rather than seasonal allergies. I can laugh at myself, and I can even encourage my family to chuckle with me because I have learned that I don’t always need to be strong, resilient, or stoic in the face of illness or infirmity.
Life is teaching me that in order to have empathy for others, we must have empathy for ourselves. We cannot have empathy for another if we do not allow ourselves to feel empathetic to our own struggles, pains, and frustrations. If we are always trying to feel perfect, look perfect, or be perfect, we will struggle to have empathy. Our laughter, even when lacking malice will not heal, but will have real potential for harm.
When I record and publish a vlog, I challenge myself to focus more on self-empathy and focus less focus on the blunders. It is my hope that as I joyfully laugh though my struggles, others can learn to give themselves permission to laugh as well.
I laugh, and I struggle, and I laugh some more in my latest video.
One of the things I love about hand crafts is that the process of doing the craft reminds us that we are the element of change – we are the magic that transforms one object into something greater than its original state.
On New Year’s Eve we find ourselves hoping there will be some magical force that will change the days ahead into something better than the days of the past. In recent years, it seems we cannot even make it through a full week into the new year without having this hope diminished.
When we realize the magic is inside our own selves, then we begin to understand that the hope for a better new year is a hope that can be achieved.
A creative splash of inspiration can be shoved aside when stress dominates. It is easy for creativity to be subdued by lack of energy, health issues, worries, and demands on our time. Yet if we think of those splashes of inspiration as miniature pieces of art unto themselves, we can treasure them up until the right moment allows us to develop them into something much larger.
This week a couple of my splashes of inspiration finally found their way into completed items. A pattern designed, a technique tried, a task completed – all in their due time.
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Whether the grey skies are from rain or emotional clouds, finding a way to bring some sunshine into our world is worth the effort.
Over the past few weeks, a number of my more able-bodied friends have discovered just how vital rest is when the body feels under attack.
The Covid-19 shots have given many a small glimpse at what it is like to live with conditions like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and the wide array of auto-immune disorders that are too many to list. Living with debilitating fatigue, and the feeling one is ill even when they are not, even for a few days can be so frustrating. Doing so without allowing your body the rest it is demanding can not only delay recovery, but it can be emotionally demoralizing.
I was fortunate to get the one-dose shot, and was very relieved. My body seems to overreact to any shot, and I was nervous that this shot would be no different. Interestingly, the shot itself only produced mild side effects. However, it triggered one of the worst fibromyalgia flare-ups I have experienced in years.
I prepared myself for the complications I suspected the shot might produce. It is not very often I get to prepare ahead of time for a fibromyalgia flare-up, so that was a nice way to start this experience. Yet, I did not calculate into my preparations the reality of having spent a year in a pandemic world.
My body simply said, “Enough is enough!”
I have been riding the rollercoaster of feel good one day, feel horrid the next.
With a bit more time, a lot more rest, and the knowledge that I have traveled this path before, I should regain the balance I had before I was knocked of kilter.
Living with chronic pain, fatigue, and other health issues is not what any of us wish for ourselves or others, but it has taught me that rest is vital for a joy-filled life. Regardless of our situation, Rest is Vital.
In between naps, I was able to fit in another short video.
Pithy Ponderings 