This is the rag rug I’ve been working on for more than a year now. Overwhelming, isn’t it? What I’ve done so far feels tiny and insignificant, and I feel so far away from the completion that it feels impossible.
I’ve been working on it in little bits: choosing cloth to cut up (old clothes that were far too ragged to give away for re-use), cutting it into painstaking strips, and finally, one by one, threading the strips into the holes. In a fit of excitement at my awesome project, I cut up the black shirts and made the border all in one day. “Oh, this wasn’t so bad!”
Every tutorial I looked at warned me that this was a long process, that the rug is created SLOWLY. “I’m sure it will be fine.”
Trying to build a writing career feels overwhelming. Heck, going on with my day feels overwhelming sometimes. Getting the dishes done feels overwhelming, leaving homework and relationships completely out of it! And all I can do is focus on the small things, one thing at a time, one moment at a time. That doesn’t mean I can’t or shouldn’t plan for the future, because I absolutely should. I must. Otherwise my focus is always just in the present, doing whatever presents itself. But I can’t focus on the entirety of what needs to be done. It’s huge and overwhelming, and that makes me freeze up, worry so much that I can’t get anything done. Instead, I have to look at what’s right in front of me, decide what my next task is going to be and focus on that. Just as with my rag rug, I can’t try to put ten strips in ten different holes at once. Instead, I have to go one at a time. Each one feels insignificant, just as each task sometimes feels insignificant. But, if chosen wisely, each task builds on the others, until eventually something beautiful has been created.
Ordinary Adventures 