Gumption

I've been making good progress on my fish, but there have been a few stumbling blocks. Most recently when I spent an hour sewing the Bokhara couching fill with the wrong color!! Instead of the white I've been using I accidentally picked a cream that looked white and didn't notice until an hour later. It got me thinking about gumption.

Living here in Japan is tough for a voracious reader, and I do mean voracious. I inhale books. Luckily, my dad is the nicest dad in the whole wide world, and he sends me books he picked up in the half-price bookstore back home. He sends me a lot of classics, which I enjoy. May I recommend East of Eden by Steinbeck? Anyway, last year or the year before he sent me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Now, I had been avoiding that book for years. Too many people had been zealously pushing it at me. Too many people going on about how it changed their life, cured cancer, got them a million dollars, bleh. But there I was in Japan with a relative lack of books, I had reread my current supply about 6 times each, and I couldn't take it. I had even borrowed the Danielle Steel novels that one of my teachers collected. So I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I will admit, I enjoyed it, and I've reread it quite a few times since then. I'm sure a lot of things stick with readers of that book. Phaedrus' obsession with and interpretation of Quality. The writing exercises he devised for his students to unstick their creativity and thought. The concept of a Chautauqua. But what always sticks with me is a section just a few pages long about gumption. The author talks about gumption as related to motorcycle repair, and how important it is not to get into a gumption trap. He extols the virtue of knowing when to quit, when to take a break and let your brain rest.

When I spent an hour using the wrong color on my fish I could feel the old thoughts crowding into my head. Good old rule #2 taking effect. If I really knew what I was doing I would have noticed the thread was different immediately. I would have checked it in better light. I would have made sure to put that thread and the true white next to each other so that the different shades were immediately apparent instead of next to a dark red floss that increased the contrast and created a false white. Behind all of that I could hear rule #3 clamoring to be heard; I had wasted time by making that mistake, and that was an unforgivable crime. I should throw the fish out right now and go wear a hair shirt to atone for my sin of cream-colored thread.

And if I wasn't treating my disorder I would have had a really difficult time ignoring those thoughts. Now I can put them into a box where they belong. I took the thread out, continued on, and didn't think anything else of it.

I should be finishing the fish in a few days barring unforeseen delays, and I'm playing around with ideas of what to do to finish detailing the bag. I want to put ferny plants on the back, but the design I'm thinking of using involves dozens of little satin stitch leaves. That could be a gumption trap. After spending so much time on the fish I could lose that momentum on a bunch of plants. On the other hand, I don't want to only do a bunch of fast, easy feather stitches and feel like I took the easy way out. I also have to take into account the factor of a sun-colored motif along the top of the bag (most likely abstract and simple), and light blue waves with French knot or seed stitch foam. Any of these could easily trap me and suck out my gumption. And yet I feel pretty darn motivated. Maybe I don't have to worry so much about gumption traps after all?