Expectations

My family and I lived in an old community up in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas for a few years. We met many wonderful people, and, as you might expect, not a few of these people had sayings and ways of thinking that were different from what we usually saw outside the community.

One of those sayings was: “You’re not supposed to be able to do both of those things at the same time, but nobody told him (her) so she (he) just went ahead and did them.” For me, this is a saying that impacts the negative power of expectations.

In craft work you can easily be defeated in your quest for the completion of a project by these negative expectations. Usually, it’s because you don’t have some needed thing. It might be a tool, a teacher, a life that has enough experience in craft to give you a leg up. You might be lacking the dexterity, or the brain power. Needing these things and not having them gives you or me a sense of inevitable failure.

That’s when we need to ignore the smart money and try it. What have we lost? The material or the clock may tell us no, but let’s give them a chance to speak. Let’s not let negative expectations run the show.