Don't hang up all your skates

I had an interesting week.

Beginning of it, I did something I hadn’t done for a long time. I taught, facilitated more accurately, a fitting class for people who make their own clothes. The participants brought in garments they made they did not feel comfortable in. Pants that bagged, bodices that had frumpy folds, necklines that, no matter what the sewer did, would not lie right.

It was a class of failed attempts. Everyone there was at least thirty years younger than I was. This meant that I had those thirty years of experience to help figure out what had gone wrong and what could be done to fix these clothes, if not in the current iteration, at least make them better next time.

Together, we solved every problem.

Once, a long time ago in another class, I had a student ask me if I was trained in Paris. (This was of course the same person who insisted her machine would only sew with silk thread). I laughed and told her that my only real qualification I had was the pile of 10,000 ruined garments behind me.

I made mistakes, I learned, I made more mistakes, I learned.

This is exactly what the women in the group that met the other night were doing. In thirty years it will be their class to teach.

This morning I read a post by a friend who said he had gone out to play hockey last night for the first time in thirty years (it seems there is a theme going here). He put on his gear and headed to the rink. There, he reported, he slipped, couldn’t skate, and lost his balance. Last time I’ll do that, he wrote, I am hanging up my skates.

This may be the right choice for him but it bothers me.

You see a few years ago I decided to stop doing what I was good at and devote myself to something I didn’t know how to do. I decided to write fiction, cozy mysteries set in Nova Scotia. It was a foolish idea and one that would likely not in any way be a success. I did it anyway. Not because I thought I would be particularly good at it, but because I had stories about people around here I wanted to tell.

I also thought it would be fun.

I read how to write mystery novels books. It’s a long game they said. It takes years.

I thought about this.

I am, after all, somewhere in the final inning of my particular game. I decided to do it anyway. Even if there isn’t enough time for me to ever get good at it. Even if no one reads these stories. I set myself a different goal.

To learn from my mistakes.

So now, when I sit down to write I say to myself, “this book is going to be better than the last one.”

I think it is. Some people are reading my novels. A few say they are waiting for the next one.

But even if they weren’t I would still do it.

Learning from 5,000 mistakes, not 10,000, is still better than learning nothing at all.

It’s a hard thing to give up where your fluency lies and take on something that you might never, ever, do well. It’s different to allow yourself to be the dunce in the class and not the teacher. Believe me I know.

But I would rather wobble on my skates than hang them up.

Not today.