Crosswords

We've gotten this far and the big blizzards, knock on wood, have so far drifted by. It did that last year also. Funny how fate leads you astray, gets your hopes up and then lets you crash in misery. The bottom line is that you can't rely on fate or luck to get you ahead. Yes, we all know people who have zoomed to stardom on a whim, but they had the skills in place to start with. Hard work, practice and, most importantly, time spent will get you further ahead than a lottery ticket bought when the jackpot is at half a billion.

As for “time spent” being the number one factor, lets look at that. I do crossword puzzles and I remember a time when I'd complete maybe a quarter or less of the items in the grid. Now, I can generally complete the entire Globe crossword when I do it. At first, I thought, that they were just getting easier! Then I thought it was the anti-biotic I was on. It had miraculously cleared out some under-performing neural connections, and now like Charley*, I was brilliant. It took me a while (so much for the concept of brilliance) to accept credit for this achievement, but I still wondered how I got so smart. Maybe it was just age. I had finally seen enough of the world and life that I just plain knew more. Naaaaah. Or maybe, it was that I had spent the time and practiced, learned the moves, and over time, actually, quite a bit of time, I'd improved. My attitude going in to the task is now more positive. I know I can do this. I have confidence (more on that in a later post!). I will not succeed every time, but I have confidence in my skills, my breadth of knowledge and now the weight of a heavy task to surmount is not pushing me down.

For crafters and artists of all types, this applies not just to the craft and learning the skills of the trade or art that is practiced, it also applies to the task of getting out there. It is, like a crossword, a cypher. We don't know the moves. We don't know what language to use. We don't know how to get there from here, but by trial and error, we will move forward and at some point in time we will find success and then we'll label it as our “lucky day”.