The ability to roll with the punches of the changing winds of fate is a skill necessary to being a practicing artist and to life in general. Whether your glaze isn’t just what you wanted, your paints haven’t dried as fast as you needed, your hands just can’t throw the shape you wanted, or the phone rings and the plans for the day, week, or month fall by the wayside, the ability to face and deal with the unexpected is invaluable. I have faced and struggled with all these possible “punches” and many others with varying degrees of success. I find the hardest thing to do is, not to stress about the punches, but to truly roll with them, to shift gears and move into the unexpected without being phased.
I got a chance to practice that skill today. To start with this is the week of my make-up art class from when I was too sick to teach in February. It snuck up on me and my students so we were already planning on getting the materials together before Thursday’s class. I was at the gym this morning planning to make the mugs for a client to give to a friend for their birthday and thinking through my blog post about the new work I’ve been making since NCECA when through my headphones I heard my text message alert. It was the mom of one of my students asking if we could meat to get me the materials so I could make the demo piece for Thursday and tell her if what she had was what we needed. So I called my mom from the treadmill to see if we could carpool to town so I could do this exchange. Having found my mother agreeable to carpooling and letting me take the car to run some errands, I set up the meeting, completely scraping all my plans for the day before breakfast, no problem. I went to my meeting and started the errands, two errands in my cell phone rang (my cell seems to herald my plans falling apart with computerized ditties): it was my mom she and her friend had made an appointment with a realtor to see a house her friend was considering and they needed the car, so on to the scrap heap went the errands (it is her car I was driving) and off we went house hunting. We grabbed lunch on the way, after seeing several houses we picked up my brother, dropped of mom’s friend and went to a late dinner. To get home at 9:30 exhausted. I am very proud of how I handled the changing face of my day.
I don’t know what was different about me today unless practice really does make perfect (if that’s true it almost makes the last two years worth it). But then again it may have been that I was expecting this week to be a little haywire, so a little added crazy is within the margin of error. So my conclusion about rolling with the punches is to practice expecting the unexpected, until I’m perfect.
