Dear crafters,
How are you all? I’d love to hear. I know I don’t often ask in a blog post but that is where it is at for me this evening. Thinking about you all, and wondering if, like me, you are finding some days a little tough at the moment….. and like me, getting the odd urge here and there to run away from home. But run to where? Tricky when we can’t travel….
Anyhoo. I just read a clip by Mark Manson who was talking about the fact that most of our moments, across any life, are going to be mundane. And that by chasing the extraordinary we are doing ourselves and our “moments” a disservice because we aren’t giving them credit for being our life.*
The societal narrative of chasing the extraordinary is pervasive; this narrative that “happiness” is waiting for us, as a permanent state, when we achieve our extraordinary goals.
And yet, that is not what a life is. So many of our moments are not that, content maybe, but not necessarily happy. And many of them are mundane. That is not a bad thing. It is life, and life needs balance. Not balance as a state that we achieve, but balance as the full breadth of emotional experience over time. A landscape of moments that have depth to them, rather than the one-note tune of happiness.
And as always it got me thinking about craft - about the making and living a life with our craft…. Because in some ways Mark’s post is the why of craft. Our making is part of the mundane everydayness of our lives.
Or in the words of Annie Dillard “how we spend our days is how we spend our lives”.
Small things, the mundane moments, and the quality of those moments are what sums up to our life.
Making is about elevating our everyday.
Wearing a handmade birthday frock making her first patchwork block many years back.
Making is about taking a moment and making it slightly richer, slightly more abundant, more connected. It’s still ordinary. I am still in the suburbs with a small pile of kids and a dirty bathroom, but this moment is made more abundant by the things we have around us. Things that we have made, or that our friends have made. Things that have substance and hold our memories. Things that have weight to them.
Making is about taking simple objects and imbuing them with meaning. It’s about having a wardrobe that contains ordinary clothes - just a top, just a skirt, nothing fancy - but as I made them with my hands and my head and my heart, they feel different. The clothes that I make have been made by me for me - and that is a richer version of the ordinary mundane experience of owning a top or a skirt.
Making over time means I’ve created many craftefacts in our home like quilts and cushions and pillowcases and tea-towels and aprons. Items that to the outsider would seem incredibly ordinary, mundane even, but to me they imbue my everyday with riches in the form of feelings that are more akin to satisfaction (and not the smug kind) or contentedness or maybe a kind of low-level sentimental joy?
Making is about taking an object that is ordinary, like a simple sweater, but making the experience of wearing it richer and more life-giving than wearing a sweater purchased from a store. It’s handmade-ness making it more than it would be if the creation of it was not connected to us. Making reminding us in the moment of our past and our potential.
Making is about enriching the moments of our lives; it’s about making the mundane (and not the extraordinary) more abundant and that bit more lush…. elevating our everyday.
Felicia x
*Please note this is my takeaway - it may not have been what he was saying exactly.
