Practice Makes Perfect: A Matter of Priorities

In Flight                               Catherine Al-Meten

Two articles caught my eye this morning, both on the essential skills a modern woman needs. The first article lists 50 essentials every woman needs to know. It begins: "1. How to open a bottle of champagne; 2. Drink without getting a hangover in the morning; and 3. How to look good in a photo.  The list went on citing 47 more similar 'essentials'.  The second article started off with the following question: "If you were a woman and not allowed to go beyond 300 metres periphery of your home, and if at all you venture out, it had to be under supervision, how would you feel?" Both articles address the plight of modern women albeit from very different circumstances.  What prompted me to search out skills for modern women in the first place, was my failed attempt at bread making, crocheting, and knitting.  I'm getting ready to do some canning, and even though I've done it before, it's been some time and I'm wondering how this is going to turn out. When I read both of these articles, I was struck that the fact that on this absurb continuum of modern woman's experiences, I was somewhere far from either extreme. 

My attempts to make bread arose out of two things: memory and desire.  I have fond memories of baking bread when I was younger. All kinds of bread including whole wheat and bran bread in coffee cans, pita bread from scratch, zucchini and pumpkin bread from vegetables from my own garden, and even some Swedish braided bread we made in a junior high home economics class.  My own mother never made bread. She in fact seemed perfectly happy to have white bread sliced in a package, thereby relieving her of the task of bread making.  My desire arose from having the good fortune to be out in the woods by myself for a couple of weeks, with time to do as I please. A friend had brought a beautiful and delicious loaf of bread to my house a few weeks ago, and having gotten her recipe, I thought, "No problem. This will be a cinch."  I even found a You Tube vid that showed an actual 4-year old making the recipe.  However, my bread did not turn out so well.  

As for crocheting and knitting, I periodically get in the mood to knit or crochet, and have grand visions of creating beautiful and artful pieces of clothing, wall hangings, and tea cozies. The problem I have each time I go to knit or crochet, involves counting. After repeated attempts to knit or crochet a straight line, I was reminded by a friend who actually does make beautiful, artful pieces of clothing in a snap, that I needed to remember to count my stiches.  "Count stiches!?" I replied in a horrified voice. The idea of doing something relaxing like knitting or crochetting and having to count stiches, just did not equate to me.  When I knit or crochet, I like to dream, and allow my imagination to wander. My fingers and hands can fly between yarn, needle, or hook, and my thoughts can wander at will.  No, counting stiches was not part of the process for me.  So at least I understand that the reason I knit or crochet has nothing to do with the practical art of creating anything but a rather asymetrical scarf-like object or wall hanging.  If I had to knit or crochet for a living or for necessity, I would have to count. I would have to follow instructions until I learned how to knit or crochet a sweater or scarf, hat or gloves.  And I would probably have to practice for a long time to get good at making anything that I or anyone else would actually use.

As for breadbaking, it is not a necessity for me to bake bread at this stage of my life. In fact, the less bread I eat, the better.  There are wonderful artisan breadmakers where I live, and I feel I can justify a fresh loaf of rustic rye bread from the Blue Scorcher once in a while.  I may try my hand at breadmaking again, but it also may not be at the top of my list of priorities right now.  Rather than obssess any more than I have, I would rather just acknowledge my deep regard and respect for those who have the skill, patience, and abiltiy to make a decent loaf of bread. I admire even more, those women who have to make bread in order for their famiies to eat each day. Whose hands are worn and marked by what they have shaped, kneaded, rolled out, baked, and served each day.  Those who bake bread not by choice but by necessity.

For all those of us who have the choice of 'going back to nature' or returning to the processes of the not-so-distant past, we may remind ourselves that becoming proficient at anything requires learning, practice, and repeated exercises of trying, sometimes failing, and sometimes succeeding. Some of us have pursued training or education in order to learn a valued profession like teaching, nursing, doctoring, engineering, scientific discovery and research, or some other technical field. We have learned skills to help raise children, take care of family finances, care for our aging parents, handle finances, learn to deal with cars and their 'problems', and we have all learned through the process of trial and error. And we most certainly have learned and continue learning about ourselves and our relationships with others.  Most of us have had our share of failure, and our share of successes. 

Many of us, and I include myself here, tend to take the path of least resistance, and go for the skills that come from passion and a talent or gift for doing something. If I have an ear for music, it is easier for me to pursue singing than it might be to pursue learning to speak Chinese. When I listened to my mother play classical music on our piano, I never could bring myself to learn to play piano because my first attempts were so poor. I did not have the drive, patience, or commitment to practice and get better. I preferred instead, to train my voice, learn an instrument that was easier for me to play, and leave piano to someone like my mother who seemed to have a gift.  

Some choices I've made have not been easy but they are the choices I have made because of my passion. My passion for the Arabic language made it a priority to learn a very difficult language. I am still learning after many years, but the basics are there, and the more I practice, the better I get.  The choice to pursue my studies and focus on the research on PTSD and Chronic Intergeneratinal Stress was also difficult, but it became a priority, and has been the motivating force behind much of what I write and much of my photography.  My photography focuses on what heals; my writing explores the whole process. The deeper I go, the better my work gets. If I were to stop, it would be fine too, but something, that inner fire, burns on and continues to awaken a need in me.

Practice makes perfect, and if we don't practice even those skills we have some aptitude for, we will never know what gifts lie unopen within us. While I don't expect to take up piano or bread making as a hobby or profession at this point, there are some things that I do have a passion for and that I have a commitment to learn, practice, and get better at. It is not necessary to be good at everything, as some perfectionists types might think. Perhaps we all have a little perfectionist residing inside us somewhere, and that is who has spent the morning berating me over my feeble attempts to get more domestic.  At a recent art studio tour, a painter sat with me for over an hour, talking about the art of being an artist. He is in his 80s, and described to me how he still wakes up at night with that little perfectionist critic berating him. We both laughed about how we have to shut those voices up, fire the critic, and go on practicing our art in order to do what we must do, be who we feel called to be, and allow our gifts to grow and flourish.  

As modern women, it is my thought that we have the unique privilege to perfect our skills in something beyond opening champagne bottles or relieving ourselves of hangovers. If all we have done with the gifts, opportunities, and freedom is to become less capable, more insensitive to the plight of others, and increasingly more shallow and empty, then we have squandered something precious and beyond value. How would we feel if we were still chattels of our fathers and husbands? How would we feel if we were not allowed to read, let alone become writers, artists, teachers, or scientists? How would we feel if we were not allowed the choices we now make on a daily basis?  

We each stand in a unique place on the earth. Some of us have more of some things and less of others. Some of us have little freedom, others have few limits. How we perceive the world from where we live, walk our daily walk, interact and honor one another, and serve and create in our lives, reveals a great deal about how we have each used the life we have been given.  We make choices, we experience circumstance beyond our control, and we live our lives perfectly and imperfectly.  We gird ourselves with our beliefs, practices, and traditions, and see the world through a lens colored by all our expereinces. Some part of ourselves, the silent observor, notices when things are out of whack or pays attention to the intuitive nudges and sensations that warn, prepare, or invite us onward. As writers and artists, we know the value of practice, commitment, and attention to learning as a means of unleashing the ideas, raising the level of our work, and of finding that mysterious gold that each of us has within. Whether we are seeking to improve the lives of our daughters and grandchildren or are simply trying to make sense of this one day, this one project, this one situation, we are all called upon by some inner force and by the Creative force of the Universe, to keep on moving, one foot in front of the other, and one line at a time, as we live out our purpose and find meaning. 

As I was completing this article, the dog started barking, a signal that someone has driven up the long drive on this lonely stretch of road.  The Veggie Lady had arrived, and with her, a cooler chest of late summer vegetables fresh from Betsy's garden.  People in this part of Washington, and other parts of the country, share their garden crops with one another as part of a coop system.  My job today now is before me. All the vegetables need to be cleaned. The refrigerator needs to be cleared out and cleaned out to make room for the vegetables.  The fruit I got for canning needs to be cooked and prepared, and for a brief period of time, I feel just a tiny iota of what it feels like to have to get the food prepared and processed so as to feed others and avoid waste.  Today's miniscule reminder tells me that I can set my mind to very practical chores, take care of the animals, keep a house in good order, and do so in the relative safety and peace of this home.