FailureCraft

The 650 Words Teachers Series continues with Ginny Robinson, who graduated from high school in 1995 and taught at Francis Parker from 2004-2008. If you missed the first installment, check out Rai Wilson’s sage words from a few weeks ago.

Ginny’s post is about a lot of things: the wonder of creating something of value; the redemptive power of allowing yourself to fail; the sad fact that we’re all going to die someday.  But it’s also about the wonderful salvation that comes from community.

I think a lot of young people take community for granted, and why not? As you go through school you become part of one community after another -- your high school friends, your college friends, sometimes subdivisions within those groups. But when you become an adult, especially after you’ve married, had kids, and moved around, it can be a lot harder to find a sustaining sense of community. As Ginny says in her post, it can be like a “walk through the desert.”

It’s certainly not impossible to find nurturing communities as an adult. You just have to work harder at it. It requires a conscious and intentional effort to connect yourself to people and groups, from political causes to adult baseball leagues to book clubs. What is Bunco Night but a reason to drink wine and reclaim a lost sense of community? (Personally, though, I draw the line at Bunco.  I'd rather be isolated and alone than play Bunco.) With demanding jobs and busy lives, it can be difficult to commit to the kind of regular gatherings and special events that make us feel human and connected. The election night parties. The group hikes. The Super Bowl watching gatherings.  Or, in Ginny's case... wild quilting parties!  But it's always worth the effort.

Ginny has done her share of moving around the country: Winston-Salem, NC; Philadelphia; San Diego; Davis; San Diego; Philadelphia; Davis; and now Chapel Hill, NC. In different places at different times, she has taught, written, traveled a little, hunkered down at home for the sake of her family, and made quilts.  See photo of her handiwork below.

Here, Ginny writes about her experience quilting, something that, to her surprise, has become a huge part of her life. “My post is about creating a safe practice of confronting failure on a very regular basis,” she said. “And using craft as a way of knowing yourself.”

- C.H.

If you’re reading this and I was lucky enough to be your teacher, there’s something I wish I’d taught you.

I wish we had developed a deep practice of, and relationship with, failure.

I wish we’d spent long periods of time figuring out a way that failure could exist in our classroom without being something that happened to us, or we regrettably did to ourselves or others or GPAs, but instead something we did for ourselves.

I picked up quiltmaking soon after leaving Parker, so I have craft to recommend for this kind of ongoing relationship.

Quiltmaking taught me to fail and to keep that failure from rippling out, into me and into my understanding of my life. The failure often stayed in the piece, though sometimes I fixed it. The initial failure was the practice, though. To say, “I wanted to do this, and it just didn’t work out.” And then either try again or try another project.

If it speaks to you and you are able, pick a craft with depth and breadth, one you cannot possibly master entirely in your lifetime. Pick a craft you love to look at. Woodwork, stone carvings, baskets, glass? Pick one you can physically do for a while, both in terms of rounds of making and in terms of years. Pick one with an active community of makers. See something in a shop window and think, “I wish I could make that,” and start to learn.

Take that craft into your hands and keep failing at it forever. Learn the basics, and then keep as much of your practice as possible just beyond your reach, even as you approach mastery. Keep thinking, “I want to try this, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s okay.”

Why?

Your life will be easier on your heart if you learn how to hold failure in your hands, literally and figuratively, without trying to strangle it.

Craft is wonderful to have when your other work becomes too digital, too theoretical, or too mind-numbing. It will provide a resting place for your eyes – upon this thing you made – when everywhere else stirs panic or dread.

Craft can teach you softly what you may otherwise learn a more difficult way.

The things you make will outlive you. Your family that hasn’t yet been born will have a token to hold and ask, “Who made this?” and get an answer: you did, the third cousin of someone or other. To hold in their hands what you once held in yours, that will be something, and the mistakes will be a record and a way of knowing you – “things became a bit tricky for her here.”

Most craft can be done with others, so you will make friends who will revel in failing with you! You will laugh together and lend each other weird tools and celebrate your wonky work. Making friends in adulthood can be a walk through a desert; don’t let it be. A friend of mine sat in my living room with two other friends of ours, worrying that she’d sunken so much time into sewing, and for what? To drown in quilts?

“For us!” we said, laughing at what a prize we were. But she, the daughter of a theologian who thinks about these things, once told her husband that when she dies, we will be some of her most grieving mourners. We will finish and label her incomplete quilts, return them to her children, donate her supplies. She would do that for us.

I know some of this sounds depressing, but life is hard and everyone at some point feels far more profound failures sharply and deeply. Engage in a constructive practice that strengthens you to bear and navigate them.

Learn to make something while holding failure gently at the same time.

This assignment from an old teacher is scalable to fit your time, space, budget. And if it’s not exactly a craft, but something that you can meet with often and with increasing equanimity, do that, and continue on.