It’s the beginning of January, when I should be writing about my resolutions for 2019, or how to set goals, or something equally upbeat. The problem is, I’m not really in that mood today. My husband has a cracked rib from coughing, my 2-year-old daughter has gone back to taking a long time to settle to sleep in the evening, and I’ve not been out in the studio for weeks. If I look too far ahead when I’m in this mood, I usually end up deciding that it’s all impossible and I’ll never be able to achieve anything and so on. Unsurprisingly this type of thinking doesn’t help me to make progress!
I was sitting in my daughter’s room this evening wondering what to write about, and I thought about a book I read years ago, The Bumps Are What You Climb On by Warren W. Wiersbe. The basic theme was that the problems and difficulties that you face are what help you to progress. Following the climbing theme, I remember helping with climbing sessions at an outdoor education centre when I was about 18 or 19. Plenty of people would look at the rock face and think ‘there’s no way I can manage that’. A technique we often used was to encourage the climber to just think about the next move – ‘can you move your right foot onto that ledge by your left ankle’, ‘can you move your left hand to the bit of rock sticking out just to the left of your head’ etc. As long as each move was kept small, was straightforward to explain and looked achievable, often the climber would suddenly discover that they had almost reached the top, even though ten minutes earlier they thought that reaching the top would be impossible for them.
So for today, I’m not going to look ahead to the top of the climb. Instead I’m going to decide what my next small (very small), straightfoward and achievable-looking move will be tomorrow. And then tomorrow I’ll do the same for the next day. And so on. Every so often I’ll need to check that I’m going in the right direction and/or have someone to help guide me. But I wonder whether longer term goal setting is best left till a day when I feel like I’m at the top of this section of the climb and can see further, rather than the days when I feel like I’m at the bottom.
So, my next move for tomorrow is to do a thread-length of stitching on a tree branch pattern embroidery sample that I’m working on. And that’s all I’m going to worry about for now!