Always learning

Today Lee asked "why have we [bloggers] stopped writing?"  So I decided to tackle that question.

For me personally, part of it is my inability to take decent pictures and get them downloaded/uploaded/shared in a timely fashion.  And I know how much  blog readers love pictures, so I feel like I'll be letting people down if there aren't pictures to accompany every post.

And of course there is the daily grind - work (at 2 jobs), a child to care for, cooking, cleaning, laundry, a husband who appreciates some attention now and then, a TV show here and there....it begins to feel rather oppressive.  Taking time to write a blog post versus spending a blissful 30 minutes stitching?  The stitching wins, 9 times out of 10.  And I don't take the time to take a picture, which leads right back to my first excuse for not posting!

So I guess what it comes down to is that I'm working on finding balance.  Balance at work (no! no new projects!), balance as a parent, as a wife, as a woman, as a crafter...and as a blogger.  And I may have discovered a new tool to help with that - aikido.  One of the professors at the college where I work wanted to start an aikido school on campus, and I decided to check it out.  Now, I've always been a bit skeptical of martial arts, and downright derisive of meditation, so my husband finds it especially ironic that I'm enjoying this.  He meditates, and has belts in tae kwon do, kung fu, karate, and judo -- and now I'm learning a martial art that is defined in some circles as "meditation in motion."  And I'm learning...a new way to learn, really.  You see, I've never been comfortable learning physical things.  My realm has always been the "I'll read about it/study it, and then be good at it."  And I HATE been the clumsy, unskilled one.  I spent too much time being laughed at and picked on as an adolescent to take what I considered to be the risk of looking foolish.  So jumping into this was awkward, to say the least.  And it was compounded by the fact that the "teaching assistant," so to speak, is an 18 year-old student who is also a brown belt.  Typically, I'm the one teaching in that relationship, not the one feeling clumsy and out of my element!  It was almost enough to scare me away after the first class, but I made myself keep going.  It has been a month now, and I almost don't have nervous jitters when I walk into the dance studio (our "dojo" of sorts).  And yesterday I went to a workshop with about a dozen black belts...amazingly, I had fun!  We shall see where this path leads....


“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums