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”.
