Assessing 2019

Early in December in preparation for composing my annual Christmas letter, I reviewed my blog posts of 2019 and was honestly surprised at what I found. Did I really do that shibori snow-dyeing this year? Finish up that dragonfly book that was a response to a recycling challenge? Play with silk fusion and stamping into hot glue? All those things felt like they'd happened the previous year and I didn't have much memory of what happened before June, when I gave machine quilting a tentative whirl. Instead, my faulty memory insisted I'd pretty much focused on sketching and various media on paper, and then got some hiking in before the weather turned. But it was enough to get me assessing my year off from quilting and exhibiting.

That's why I think it doesn't hurt to do a year-end review, and those who do have probably finished that task by now. But it's not too late to look back at the previous year and see what you can learn from it. Here's a simple tool I came across that mirrored what I'd been doing in my head but taking it a bit farther. You might like to give it a try. Simply divide a piece of paper into four quadrants, the left hand ones to list "wins" and "losses", the right hand ones to record "lessons" you learned from each of those wins and losses. The "wins" would be things that went well, that you were excited about, and even proud of. The "losses" would then be what didn't go well, what disappointed you, and what didn't go the way you wanted them to. I still need to do this written exercise but already I know a few things to go in each quadrant.

First and foremost would be to put my 2019 resolution word, "wing it" into the "wins" quadrant. I've never been very comfortable just winging it on anything, but making it my mantra gave me a freedom I'd not allowed myself very often. Not only did it help me to get up the courage to try some things without spending a lot of time researching how to do them, I quit worrying about how I would use the results of all these trials and sometimes errors. Just do it for the experience and to decide if it's worth exploring some more.

I recently read an interview with Urban Sketcher and teacher Paul Wang (January 2020 issue of Drawing Attention) where he talks about the need for "roots and wings" and I realized that my wing it approach was the wings part of his analogy, the part that has been missing a bit from my creative journey:

"One of my teaching philosophies is to have roots and wings at the same time. Some students are too rooted in (in formula). They need to fly. Experiment. Other students might benefit from grounding in principles and concepts and theories . . . When you have the balance of both, you're going to be stable yet adventurous at the same time. So today... should we fly?...Or take roots?"

Paul Wang on Instagram

So getting used to winging it should make it easier now to break out of my rootedness as I return to my art quilting.

"Roots and wings" isn't the only place where I need more balance. I've always had so many interests vying for my time and attention, and the ability to dabbled in so many of them in 2019 was surely a win. But it also pointed out my "all or nothing" nature, the tendency to focus on one thing to the exclusion of most everything else, and to let time get away from me from either lack of scheduling of my time or finding that my curiosity has taken me down an internet rabbit hole. (Working on my family history is a good example of that.) I think the key to a satisfying year for me is to find a balance in how I spend the time set aside for creativity (all those competing interests from sketching to multi-media to surface design to quilting), and to also find a balance in attention given to my other interests (reading, knitting, genealogy, organizing and digitizing the family history files, hiking). I really need to manage my time better, and with that, balance should come. After all, whenever I engaged in something with short-term daily requirements (like INKtober or all those soon to be disappearing free Sketchbook Revival videos), I WAS able to schedule the time required to keep up (a definite one for the "wins" quadrant).

To be honest, I have not missed the quilting as much as I thought I would and I'm not sure which heading that would go under. I've caught myself feeling reluctant to get back to the quilting because I'm not ready to give up the sketching and the multi-media experiments, which the quilting focus always demanded what with its constant exhibit deadlines. That may be why my 2020 resolution word rose to the top of the list and felt like an answer to this quandary of so much I want to do but running out of time to do it. If I heed this resolution to GO! at every turn, I shouldn't have to give anything up, should I? There should be a way to balance my time to include more than just one thing, to be efficient as I work, to seamlessly move from one to the other during the day or week, to schedule my days and weeks so nothing gets irretrievably left behind. Because I truly believe that everything in my life feeds into making me happy and productive and creative. Without engagement in all that variety I'm left unhappy and full of regret and longing. Time to GO!