Ready for nature! Ready for life.

I’m at a family reunion sitting under a canopy watching two of my brothers, an uncle, and my mother play a long game of croquet. One of my six (seven?) year old cousins gets something in her shoe. Semi-frantic, she dashes over to her parents. Her voice wavering with the first notes of panic, she says, “There’s a thorn in my shoe!”

Her parents calmly recommend she take her shoe off and dump out whatever is in it.

She does.

It’s not a thorn.

With the crisis averted, she puts her shoe back on and stands.

“Now I’m ready for nature!” she exclaims.

Then she darts off to play with the other kids (one is digging in the dirt. Another is wielding a croquet mallet like a weapon. Another is hammering croquet wickets into the ground for some game she’s organizing but has nothing to do with actual croquet).

I watch her go. Ah, such newfound confidence. What resilience. What adaptability.  

These days there isn’t a lot I feel ready for. And too often, I experience a surging panic of my own because everything feels like a thorn.

I’ve been winging it a lot. In a lot of areas. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just sometimes I wish I knew everything I needed to know already. Or that it was already done and behind me. Or that one task out of the million tasks didn’t actually need to be done or I could outsource it but still get the learning benefit. Or . . . well, you get the point.

Later in the week, I’m chatting with a fellow author. She tells me one of her mentors had once talked about how she’d tried a technique with a book, but at the time she didn’t yet have the skills for it. Still, she’d done the work, she’d tried the technique, she’d finished the project. But in the end, it wasn’t quite what she’d hoped for.

Life is a lot like that.

We develop skills as we go. We finish projects that don’t quite achieve the vision we’d had for them. We try again. We get better.

Aren’t we all just learning as we go?

Mastery is about showing up for the work. Trying and failing. Revising and learning. It’s about the daily practice whose repetition grinds in the muscle memory, establishes habit.

So I show up. I learn new things. I practice old ones.

And yet, while doing this thing called life is about adapting, growing, learning, it’s also about having some fun along the way. Sometimes I forget the fun.

With that in mind, I make notes for myself. Little coping strategies. Little encouragements.

Such as:

If you have a “thorn” in your shoe, take it out.

Keep up a daily practice.

When you have the skills, use them. When you don’t, wing it. It’ll probably end up fine.

Or at least, if it doesn’t, once you’ve developed the necessary skills, you can try again.

Don’t forget the fun.

 

Metaphorically, I shake out my shoes. Both of them, because why not? 

Then, as my young cousin did, I head back to join in on the game, exclaiming as I go (more as a way to claim it as truth than anything else), “Now I’m ready for life!”