Figuring it Out Along the Way

Generally speaking, I like to have things at least sort of figured out before I try them. I like to know where I’m going to park, how long and steep the trail is, what questions I might be asked, what’s on the syllabus. If I’m going to need unfamiliar ingredients, that recipe just got a lot less inviting.

This can be a good thing. Inspecting a ski race course before your race run is a required part of race day. Planning out time for major projects across several college classes would have made my life a lot easier if I’d actually done it. Running out of yarn is classic knitting mistake.

And it can be a bad thing. When I studied abroad in Sweden, there were a lot of things I didn’t do because I was afraid of not knowing how it was going to go. For example, there was a beautiful café across the street from Linnaeus’ gardens I rode my bike past every single day. Every single day, I’d think about going in. I didn’t actually ever get brave enough to do it until Mom came to visit me the last week I was there. And when we did go in? It was just as lovely, the food just as tasty, as I’d daydreamed it would be.

Given these examples, you can see this is something that applies across all of my life; but there’s one major exception. When I write, I just start writing. This was true of papers I wrote in college, it’s true of these blog posts, and it’s true of every audio piece I’ve ever recorded for the teaching magazine Kaleidoscope. (I’m up to three now, some of which are still to be published!)

I used to get terrible white-page-paralysis. I liked revising more than writing because there was already something there for me to work with. When I got to college and papers became both much longer and more frequent, I had to figure out how to get over it. So what I did was I wrote something I knew was absolute garbage for an introduction and mostly just skipped straight to the nitty gritty of what I was talking about. I wrote my way through the paper and by the time I got to the conclusion, I actually knew what point I was trying to make. So I copy-pasted my conclusion up to the introduction, revised my paper to match that thesis, and by the time I’d done the revisions I could write the real conclusion.

Two blog posts ago, I wrote about showing up. It’s something I’m still thinking a lot about, and this tendency I have to try to be perfectly prepared before I start is one of my big stumbling blocks. So consider this a little bit of a part two to that blog; once I’ve shown up, now what? Now I start figuring it out as I go.

Adventurer

Oh my goodness has the last month been good to my adventurer outdoorswoman self. This winter was officially the snowiest on record in Utah (as well as other parts of the mountain west)! As I mentioned in my last blog post, Jonathan and I spent two nights in a yurt at Pearl Lake State Park as part of our trip to Steamboat. It was our first overnight trip away from Peter and it was amazing. The skiing was amazing, Peter did awesome with my parents, and Jonathan and I had some really good conversations.

On Tuesday, we skied up Mt. Farwell. This was a pretty big day for me, especially since we’d skied the day before and planned to ski the next day as well. I wasn’t sure how far up the mountain I would make it, especially there’s a little bit of a flat hike to get in there and I was feeling tired before we really even started climbing. Jonathan, as usual, was incredibly patient and was just glad to be out skiing with me. So we had our lunch and the bottom of the climb and decided just to go until I wasn’t having fun anymore.

Turns out I very nearly topped out the mountain! I ultimately decided not to do it because the top got very flat (which meant a lot of walking for not much skiing), the snow was very windblown, and pushing myself didn’t feel good anymore. But I got a whole lot higher than I thought I would, and man was the skiing amazing. I was really proud that I just kept going up a little ways at a time and figured out where my stopping place was when I got there.

(I also got very sunburned, and that’s NOT something I should have to figure out at this point. I should know better!)

Planning is a really important part of adventuring safely. Everyone should have an idea of where they’re going, how long it will take, appropriate clothing and food and water, and a map. However, it’s also really important to be able to improvise and adjust as you go as conditions change and my body responds differently than I thought. It just so happened that my legs responded better than I thought they would on Farwell, which was exciting.

Nerd

I’m still in the middle of doing lots of writing. I just submitted my first blog post for Tales of a Mountain Mama! (I will also post it on Facebook when it’s time for it to be published.) I spent a lot of time on it, and in the end I wasn’t super satisfied. It was fine, but it wasn’t great. When I told Mom this, she replied,

“Well, that’s because it took you the whole blog post to get to the ‘why’. You should move that up to the top.”

Does this sound familiar? Like a writing strategy I’ve used before?

I did, and she helped me write a better conclusion. I think the blog post is much better now. And I’m excited for it to go out into the world!

I also recorded an audio piece for Kaleidoscope. It’s quite a ways out from being published, but I’ll share it too once it’s ready. It came from a seed of an idea I had about the children’s book The Little Red Hen and monologued about to Jonathan over Marco Polo. I wrote a transcript of that Marco Polo and then tried to grow that idea into something with more depth and nuance. Turns out that as I did that, I completely changed one of my original ideas about how and when we should judge other people’s actions, when (and how) we decide to hold someone accountable, and when we decide to be generous and give another chance. It was almost a little frustrating to realize it! I was not in the mood to revise my piece at that moment – I was typing away during naptime and my time was almost up. I took a deep breath, kept writing, and did the revising the next day. I couldn’t ignore what I’d figured out.

That’s my process of writing. I figure stuff out as I write, even when that wasn’t my original plan!

Old Lady/Hobbit

One of the key aspects of this part of myself is the creativity I find in making things, whether I’m sewing or knitting or baking. And honestly, sometimes it’s hard to find the energy right now to engage in the creative part. I say this as a preface for admitting I’ve made little progress on the twenty-one recipes. It’s still a project I’m working on, but not one where I have much progress to share.

There is something comfortable about a recipe I’ve made a million or so times. I know what to put on the grocery list. I know how long it’s going to take. I know how it’s going to turn out. I know if I will like it, if Jonathan will like it, and I think most importantly, if Peter will like it.

Feeding Peter has been, since the very beginning, the biggest source of mom anxiety for me. And while I’ve gotten much more calm about it, I think it’s still there. (Guess what. I figured that out by writing this blog post. In fact, I stopped after the first paragraph of this section and stared off into space for a while before I could keep writing.) I’m putting a lot of pressure on the product, which is dinner, and so figuring it out as I go feels more high stakes.

Having a recipe makes me more confident. Having a recipe with familiar ingredients makes me even more confident. And the easiest, of course, is a recipe I could make in my sleep. But there isn’t a whole lot of learning there.

Musings

In writing, or in storytelling more generally, I am good at just jumping in without a plan. When I did the writing retreat, a year-long writing group through The Knowles Teacher Initiative, I had no idea what I wanted to write about or if I wanted to publish anything. I ended up with an awesome piece that was very important for me to write that is also very personal and won’t ever be published. When I participate in Story Slam, I get a five-minute slot to stand in front an audience and tell a story. I sign up the night of and figure out my story in the couple of hours prior to being called on.

An even more extreme example? In one of my favorite graduate classes, I gave myself one hour per page and started writing that many hours before the deadline. (This often meant starting six-page papers at 6 PM before a midnight deadline.) Nothing like having absolutely no other option to get motivated! But I also believed that I could produce something worth my professor’s time (and worth a decent grade). And I think I did (my grade was certainly fine).

I have a sense of confidence in my writing that I will be able to produce a worthwhile product. I don’t start completely from scratch usually; in that college class, I’d been diligent about keeping up with the readings and participating in class discussions, which was the fodder for my papers. But I trust that I have enough good stuff floating around in my head and that I will be able to articulate that into something useful. I’ve done it enough times to believe I can do it again.

I have some sense of that confidence, that trust, in knitting and in adventuring. I know what I need to know ahead of time and what I can figure out along the way. I know how to build in enough supports that when I jump in, I’ll have what I need to figure stuff out. Which leaves me with several questions around cooking. What supports do I need? A backup dinner? More practice improvising? I’m not sure yet.

I might just need to figure it out as I go.

Hej då,

Jamie