Year Two Begins: so obsessed with our efforts to repair

So I started this blog about a year ago. What's changed? Everything and nothing, I guess.
Last year I had 60 posts--about an average of 5 per month.

Goals from last year that remain:
1) write everyday. I read somewhere that there was this was this pottery teacher who decided on unusual way for grading her students. Half of her students she would grade on quantity. At the end of the term she would just measure the amount of clay they went through. The other half she would grade on one perfect piece. What she found is that the "quantity" group not only produced a higher quantity of work but a higher quality. The other group was focused on the goal of perfection that they didn't produce much and therefore never learned much. ( Source: Natalie Goldberg? Julie Cameron? Art and Fear?)

And such is life. We must go through much to learn much. It's so easy for some of us ( me) to overthink things. Don't fret about failures or mistakes. They are as much a part of the process as anything else.

Anyway, today is DAY ONE.
We're always starting from day one.
But if we retain the knowledge of what has come before, we begin again stronger.

From The Buried Age by Christopher L. Bennett p.396:

"I mean that, sometimes, we must learn to accept that we were simply not meant to succeed at everything. We must accept our failures and we must forgive ourselves for them. Otherwise...otherwise, " he went on ruefully, " we may become so obsessed with our efforts to repair our mistakes hat we are blinded to other priorities and end up causing more harm. First to ourselves, and eventually to others."

--Captain Jean-Luc Picard speaking to Giriaenn, an immortal other. He is speaking as much about her quest to atone for desctroying all life in the universe the first time as he is speaking to himself about his mistake of releasing her people from their eternal slumber.


Mistakes of Picard

so obsessed with our efforts to repair,
we are blinded,
end up causing harm.

learn to accept we were not meant to succeed at everything.
Not even Star Captains or Manraloth are perfect.
Even immortals sing the blues.

--M.R. Timevapore