No silver lining here

There's a saying in the yoga community — or at least that's where I used to hear it — that goes something like "how you show up on the mat is how you show up off the mat." I think it comes from a more universal saying about how we do one thing being how we do everything. I was turning this over today as I finished a not-so-great print project of mine.

The project was meant to be something I kept — hung on a wall, maybe, or gifted to someone. I ordered certain inks and spent time carefully planning which image to focus on, the placement, the colors. But as the project went on, I noticed the pieces weren't coming together at all. And I could tell pretty early that my heart wasn't in it, either. That was disgruntling, since I'd planned for this to be meaningful. It sounds a little silly saying it back — the planning of something to be meaningful.

Still, when I noticed about halfway through (the project lasted about a month) that it wasn't going to go as planned, I really wanted to give myself permission to just call it a day. Pack the supplies up and go. But something in me said, complete the dang thing. So the next day I went to the local copy center to get my stencils, and I continued on. Determined. Stubborn? Wishful thinking?

I went to the studio and splattered some ink down. Mixed black and white into a pastey gray. And ran my first print. And then my second.

Well — it was what I'd thought from the beginning. A total disaster. The ink didn't spread right, and it didn't wash off my materials when it came time to clean up. It was gooey, a total mess. I tossed the image. It was really that bad.

There's no silver lining here. No happy accident, nothing pretty made out of the mess. I think the reason it reminded me of the yoga-mat saying is that there was something in my own awareness that my process had been choppy the whole time. I was trying to will this project into being, trying to force a process I just wasn't feeling. And I couldn't muster it.

So my takeaway is this, and it's a little contradictory, which I'll let stand. It's okay to be choppy and messy and throw the project away. And it's also quietly nice to me that I made the actual print anyway, however it came out. Both of those feel true. The painful part is the in-between: when you're in a committed act — and it doesn't much matter what the act is — and it simply isn't going as planned. Sometimes there's nothing to do but stay the course, take your lumps, go home, and wait for another day.