In each moment we are becoming something.
Always. In each moment, becoming is happening to us and through us; happening through the choices and non-choices we make about how we spend our moments.
We are always learning, growing and changing in each moment, even if that change is simply us becoming more of the same, our character becoming more ingrained by us being as we ever were. This being is still a form of becoming. Always.
I remember the moment I first heard this idea from the poet David Whyte at a talk I was lucky enough to attend in Melbourne last year.
“We are always becoming” he said. “Of course we are!” I thought.
It was a profound shift for me to have this idea laid out this explicitly. It gave me a sense of urgency, of consciousness, a knowing that I had the power to choose in each moment the kind of person I wanted to be.
He framed the idea as practice.
That in this moment, we are practicing becoming the person we want to be in the next.
So simple. So beautiful.
This idea has shaped my year, helping me to make more engaged choices about who I want to be. And I’m grateful.
But then just last week I heard Chase Jarvis on a podcast saying that “you can’t be the noun without doing the verb”. Again it’s an idea that touches on becoming, but it explicitly states that becoming is an action. So in my case I can’t be a writer without doing the writing. I can’t be a knitter without doing the knitting. Or I can’t be aware without consciously practicing awareness.
We are all active participants in our becoming, shaping our future selves by the choices we are making in this moment. Choices about what to do, how to think, who to be. Each choice we make, ingrains more deeply a thought pattern, a value system, a behaviour. Or if we are chasing change, each choice shifts us towards a new way of being. Regardless each choice we make reiterates what we believe is important. Each choice is our active participation in our becoming.
Late night obsession.
Now, maybe some of you have an old-school cultural narrative nagging at you as you are reading saying “well this is just a load of piffle. We all know a leopard can’t change it’s spots. We are who we are.” To which I would say nuh-ah. The science backs me up*. Who we are changes throughout our lives and this includes our personalities. We are not fixed. No one nowhere is fixed. Life changes us. Experience changes us. Relationships change us. We may change more slowly as we age but we still change. For example the research shows us that overall we get less neurotic and more agreeable and conscientious as we age. Not everyone, everywhere obviously, but on average this is what happens.
One of the tragedies of our becoming is that due to it’s subtlety, and that we are caught up in the busy and numbness of our everyday, we often don’t see it or notice it. And unless we experience some kind of epiphany (or are lucky enough to go see David Whyte speak) then we are sometimes blind to how we have changed and why. And yet changed we are.
By not seeing it, we forget that we can choose to engage in the process with more awareness.
So how do we see it – this becoming – and how do we engage with it such that the idea of becoming is something that we can be inspired and uplifted by. How can we choose to be courageous in the face of this opportunity? To be courageous enough to choose to become the person we want to become by practicing the characteristics and qualities we want to embody.
Seeing our becoming is part of what makes our craft practice so extraordinary. Unlike many areas of our life, our craft gives us visible artefacts (craftefacts anyone?) that hold our memories and values. But they also hold something else that is incredibly valuable. They hold our history. They are a snapshot of who we were in that given moment – in our technical skills but also in our emotional and cognitive skills. The things we make are road map of our becoming.
But our craft offers us something more special than simply seeing. The process of making offers us opportunity after opportunity to consciously engage with our stories, our uncertainty, our fears, and our desires. We get to engage with possibility. And not just the possibility of the thing we are making, but of the possibility of being the person we could become when we choose to stretch ourselves to make the thing we want to make.
When I made the quilt I’m sitting on as I write, I was still struggling with perfectionism in my making. I was still attaching my value as a person to the quality of the things I made, and what other people thought of them. And to tell you the truth, sometimes I still do. Becoming a completionist rather than a perfectionist will be lifelong work for me. It will be a practice and it is one that I get to engage with whenever I make a thing. Choosing to focus on the meaning and intention and values that are embodied in the thing I have made – and the beauty I’ve created – regardless of whether the stitching is straight and the finishing flawless. I have value because I exist. For no other reason. My craft gives me a process within which I get to engage with this belief, and practice this cognitive pattern and emotional process over and over again, ingraining this belief a little more moment by moment. This chance to actively practice a new way of being is a part of the magic of our making practice.
Moving through perfectionism is such important work. It affects how I parent, and the grace with which I show up for others in my life. If I expect myself to show up perfectly, flawlessly, and that is the face I show the world, then there is no way for my relationships to have true connection and empathy as I am always putting on a front. A front made of fear and shame. Shame that I might not be enough. Perfectionism is a trap and it’s one so many of us are taught very young. It is also a behaviour that we can work to no longer engage with; we can become completionists with intention and practice.
My latest quilt, which I haven’t really shared online yet, is evidence of my progression in this life work. I have intentionally created it to have wonk – a once unthinkable thought. I found that the quilts I loved online had wonk. They weren’t the perfectly symmetrical geometric shapes that were ironed flat to within an inch of their lives. They were the improvisational, wonky, think Gee’s Bend type quilts, that made my heart go pitter patter. Pitter patter because of the freedom and the joy and the spirit of the human that was making them. Their humanity is what I adore and connect to and aspire to. I wanted to be more like those quilts. To be more of who I was in all its imperfect beautiful glory.
Quilting allows me to practice that way of being.
My latest quilt was roughly drawn up based on a beautiful Gee’s Bend quilt from my favourite quilting book. A template was made for each piece and then the pieces were roughly cut out with scissors. Some pieces were cut to the size of the template. Others were cut ½ inch-1inch wider or longer or… Loose like a goose. And gee it was fun. I watched a movie with my kids in our backroom on a rainy day as I chip-chopped it out. It is called the wedding quilt. It is totally made of scraps – and includes scraps from my son’s wedding shorts and shirt, my girl babies’ wedding frocks and my partner’s wedding suit. It also has a special piece of indigo dyed by a friend in the US and all sorts of other treasures.
Each block was sewn onto another and squared off by eye – there was not a rotary cutter or mat in sight. This quilt is the embodiment of who I am in this moment. But more importantly it came about based on me choosing to become who I want to be. A person who steps into the messy humanity of life. A person who works on her stuff. Who tries to be more self compassionate. Lifelong work but critical if I want to spend this one precious life with more grace.
I often have people saying to me that they aren’t a knitter/sewer/quilter and yet they’d love to be. And yet, for whatever reasons, they aren’t stepping into a space whereby they are practicing the skills that they want to learn to become the thing they want to be.
In other words, they aren’t doing the verb to become the noun.
There are lots of reasons we don’t take the steps to become the thing we want to be – but most often I believe it is because of two reasons.
Firstly, we believe the narratives we have about ourselves. About what we are, or are not capable of. That we can’t ever make something as beautiful as Denise, because she is so “talented”, “creative” and “glorious”. And yet, Denise is just like us. Her head too is full of narratives telling her about her potential and her limitations. But unlike us, Denise is practicing. She is choosing to become the thing she wants to become by engaging. By putting one foot in front of the other. She is choosing to set the narrative aside, and make a choice to actively practice choosing the life she wants to have. To become.
She is practicing being the kind of person who sets the narrative aside – and by doing so she is becoming the kind of person who sets the narrative aside. How incredibly simply but beautiful is this idea!!
Secondly, because we get overwhelmed and overstimulated and busy and forget to make conscious choices about who we want to become and what we need to do to get there. This happens to all of us sometimes, and to some of us all the time. When we forget to choose to engage with becoming, we leave our best life, our possibility to chance. Yes we could accidently choose healthy life-fullfilling ways to spend our time, but it’s unlikely. Instead we scroll through our phone, binge watch The Good Place, eat crappy food and don’t make the thing we really want to make. We make other things. Easy things. Things we don’t love because we are scared of really trying, scared of failing, scared of wasting materials or that the thing that we will make won’t live up to the ideal in our head.
And make no mistake. When we make those choices, to aimlessly wander and squander our time and our energy, then we are still becoming. We are just becoming something a less than our potential, and living a life that is less life-giving.
Of course - and this is the big caveat of this post - sometimes when things are overwhelming and sad and hard and uncertain and stressful, when we are anxious or flat or tired or sick, then we are going to make choices that don’t serve us. Of course we are. Sometimes we aren’t capable of choosing well. And that is (of course) OK. That is us doing our best to get by.
I am as guilty of this as anyone as I am an imperfect, messy, hypocritical, tired, overwhelmed, human who while trying hard doesn’t always hit the mark. I know what I value. And I know who I want to be. And yet, I often make choices that aren’t in line with either my values or the future me I know I want to be. This is especially true when the shit hits the proverbial.
This has been my much of my last year. In late 2018 things got tricky for my family in a few different but life changing ways. And in the overwhelm, I stopped making choices that served me and my becoming. I gave up eating well, meditating, sleeping properly and exercising. And I pretty much stopped making. I took up binge watching tele and eating hot cross buns and chocolate. Overwhelm lead to self-destructive choices that meant I became more anxious, more overwhelmed, and less of the person I want to be. But at the time the choices I made seemed to be practical and right. To me and my muddled head they seemed totally logical. And yet they made me worse and the situation worse…..
Lucky for me I have incredibly lovingly bossy friends who started one step at a time making me do the things I need to do to find some equilibrium. And part of that was to look at choosing becoming. In spite of the overwhelm to do things that supported being my best self in the middle of the mess. It was hard and slow and it’s still not over (I haven’t been to the gym in two weeks!) but the idea of using becoming as a path to well-being has been such an uplifting one.
And my making practice is always a big part of that. Making as a metaphor for becoming, for choosing aliveness, for choosing comfort and joy and engagement with the things in life that are beautiful.
Choosing to engage when we are down can in itself become overwhelming – and so sometimes we have to engage in the kind of making and living that is simply surviving. This kind of becoming is in and of itself a beautiful loving choice that we can make for ourselves. To go back to the basics. For me this looks like sleep, good food, meditation, exercise and basic basic craft. Stocking stitch, flat sleeves and basic sewing. Nothing fancy or complicated; nothing that will take up any cognitive load but instead simply focus on joy and comfort. Because when I choose to prioritise well-being over development I am choosing to become the kind of person who prioritises well-being. And that is really the only way to live well.
And what I learned (again – because sometimes we need to learn our life lessons over and over again!) was that making better choices when things are hard – life supportive and life giving choices – make things better. Of course this isn’t always possible – sometimes we don’t have the energy or insight to choose differently – but when we do, even when we are in a hole, we can still feel ourselves becoming our best hole-dwelling selves. And that makes being in the hole that tiny bit better.
Our craft is becoming made manifest.
I have been privileged over the years to hear these stories from so many of you. Stories of quiltmaking that has got you through brain tumors and depression and sick babies and grief. Stories of how making, when hard is all we know, provides us with some forward movement, some access to beauty and hope and possibility. It’s active engagement in something other than the mountain of hard we have in front of us.
Our craft enables us to practice being the kind of human we want to be. A human who is engaged with creating good things in the world. A human who prioritises looking after their head and their heart by engaging with an activity that brings them comfort and joy. Who is practicing patience, and stick-to-it-ness and gumption. Who is learning and doing hard things. A human who is simply putting one foot in front of the other. A human who is consciously connecting with their community, their memories and their values.
A human who values process because it is through the practice of engaging with process we become someone different to who we were, moment by moment.
How we engage with our craft and who we become through our craft is of course different for all of us. We each bring our own individuality and life experience to our craft practice, and with our different focus we become the thing that we value.
To live the life we really want to live, to make the thing we really want to make, to become the person we really want to become, we have to choose over and over again to engage in our own becoming – and by choosing to prioritise wellbeing we are best able to contribute to the world we want to see.
As makers, our making practice –the things we make and how we choose to make them – is inevitably a big part of our becoming. By making we are actively choosing a life of engagement – with our hands and our values. We are choosing to engage with trying. We are choosing to prioritise becoming.
Felicia x
*I went back to university this year and am studying Psychology!! Who knew there was research to back up so many of my theories – and obviously to disprove others :).
