Making Time for Mistakes
A few hours at the weekend isn't enough...
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" Scott Adams; “The Dilbert Principle”.
I’ve been reading and listening a lot of books and podcasts lately based around “finding yourself, creatively”… and a lot of these talk about “taking the time to make mistakes”.
That’s great. I make a lot of mistakes, but the kicker is “once you’ve batted a few mistakes out the window, then you can enter the flow state. The zen.” What if the time you have rarely allows you to reach that point?
I have experienced the flow state. There have been times when everything goes right. Everything flows, everything connects, and it’s mesmerizing.
Recently, that has been missing.
I don’t know how I got so busy? Maybe it’s because I’m trying to do too much – something that even my teachers at school said about me in my yearly reports. Philip spreads himself too thin.
On my bench at the moment are three different projects, all at various states of unfinished. I’m either waiting on parts for one, am more interested in another, or don’t have the energy or enthusiasm for any of them after five days of mental anguish of office work. The result of this is three projects that I look at and have grown to dislike because progress has been so slow.
One of them, a new knife block for my kitchen was started in October last year. It’s a very simple design. It’s three bits of wood that need joining together into a U shape and then slats added across the top… however, I’ve been torturing myself in how to fix these together. I want to dovetail them together, but my dovetail joints are not good enough for something that will be on display, so I need to practice, which means finding bits of hardwood I don’t mind committing to practice pieces, and the practice is slow.
I don’t have the right kind of hammer; I need a new hammer. My chisels aren’t sharp enough; they need sharpening. There’s not enough light on the bench; I need to change the lighting set up… and so it goes on. I’m getting on my own nerves with finding all the reasons why I can’t finish this otherwise very simple bit of joinery.
Yesterday I was listening to the latest episode of the Caro Podcast with the artist Joel Parkes. There was a simple sentence, but one that resonated. “Moving out of your own way”. Put eloquently, a practice of seeing behind self-sabotage and moving towards your potential. Or, another way…
Take your mind out of the thing, and get on with doing the thing.
Sage words indeed. So now I just need to find the time to get the mistakes out the way and then maybe I’ll get these projects finished. Maybe I should just shelve two and finish one, then another, then another.
How do you eat an elephant? One spoonfull at at time.