Three Things Thursday No. 20: Temporary? Or Permanent?
Hiya!!
How are you? Enjoying the Spring weather? It finally got sunshiney here in the Pacific Northwest and boy am I loving it!! Most of my favorite flowers are in bloom and it is just beautiful. I have more to say about flowers next time, but today I’ve got something on my mind that I wanted to talk to you about.
When my kids were little, we used to watch the PBS show Curious George. It was soooo good. The stories were fun and funny but with gentle life lessons. The first series was narrated by William H. Macy and the entire show just felt like being a kid on a summer’s day with nothing to do but have your own adventures.
One of our favorite episodes was when George decided to try and keep water available for some puddle ducks so they wouldn’t fly away, and eventually they end up with a mother duck and her baby in the house bathtub. As George sits and watches the ducks paddle about, The Man With The Yellow Hat yells up from downstairs, “George? Remember! The ducks are here TEMPORARILY.”
Then the narrator says, “George wondered how long he could make temporarily last.”
Thing 1: Temporary Becomes Permanent
Oh my gosh, I just loved that show, and that little bit was so cute.
Except that it became kind of a running joke at my house. We have had so many temporary things that have become permanent, like our home renovation or my business being in the “startup” (read: not making any money yet) phase, that whenever I say, “this is only temporary,” my kids say, “you mean permanent?” (This is usually followed by quotes from this episode of Curious George.)
It’s embarrassing and discouraging. And it kills me that this is what my kids are growing up with.
This year my big focus has been to make my business into an actual business (i.e. that has customers and income) instead of just this thing I’m always working on but somehow isn’t really getting anywhere. It’s not that I don’t work on it, I do, but I haven’t been able to really focus on it. It seems like there’s always something going on that has a deadline that I can’t ignore, plus all these open, unfinished projects that make everything just take 5x longer than it should. But I didn’t feel like I could afford to stop working on my business and just finish all those unfinished projects, either.
Guess what?
In practice, I kept saying I couldn’t afford to stop and finish these projects, but in reality I couldn’t afford not to.
Thing 2: Making Permanent Temporary Again
I finally decided to get some professional help and hired a coach. Smartest decision I have ever made. He helped me to realize that until I actually finished all these unfinished projects, I would never get anywhere with my business. I might be fine for a short time, but eventually I was going to crash and burn.
For example, our house. Our house has been under construction for a very long time. We have been living without a kitchen for (omgosh i can’t believe i’m admitting this) two years. (Dang, that’s embarrassing). And yet I want to help people to create a simple, creative life that they love and a big part of that is having a joyful, supportive space to live in! Even if I don’t have to walk my talk (though I think its important that I do) if I don’t deal with the house, I’ll just end up wasting all of my energy and time fighting with it, which, by the way, is antithetical to what I am trying to teach! Your home should give you the space and inspiration to live the life you want to live, not drag you down.
Well (says I), when you put it like THAT…
The bottom line is that the only solution (at least for me) is to buckle down and TEMPORARILY set aside my business while I TEMPORARILY devote most of my time to getting the house (and my other unfinished projects) done.
Things that were supposed to be temporary have become permanent. So it’s time to temporarily make some sacrifices in order to make the permanent temporary again.
Starting yesterday, my entire family is spending most weekday mornings on the house. Instead of taking 2 years to finish, we are going to be finished this year. By the end of the summer we will have progressed far enough for me to be able to showcase projects, printables and patterns that I hope will help you get to where you want to go.
I’m so excited.
Thing 3: Refreshed Tutorials!
While I’m in “clear the runway mode” aka “get all the old projects done and out of the way” mode, I am not going to be creating a ton of new content. But I am going through and updating all the articles I’ve written over the years. I’ll share the newly updated posts each newsletter so you can find them and make use of them. Most of these will be tutorials and projects, but there will be some stories and fun mixed in as well.
This week, I have a newly updated tutorial on how to make your own portable, small-space-friendly ironing surface. Perfect for small spaces or the traveling crafter, my solid ironing surface also gives you super-crisp creases and is elevated to protect the surface below. You can find that here:
How To Make a DIY Ironing Surface
That’s it!
This week it’s all about recognizing where the temporary things have become permanent and how to change them back into temporary so you can move on to the most important parts of your life.
What about you? What’s the “temporary” thing in your life that you want to have go back to being temporary? Leave a comment below, or you can also always find me on Facebook or Instagram!
Much love,
P.S. If you have children (or heck, even if you don’t), you really do have to try the PBS series, Curious George. It’s fun and funny and there’s no bad attitudes, no weirdness and no talking animals (though admittedly they seem quite a bit more intellegent than their real-life counterparts). Just a genuinely curious monkey and his adventures. The episode I am referring to is entitled “Water for Ducks” and is conveniently on the excellent first season on DVD or digitally on Amazon Prime Video. I know it’s odd, but I truly love this show and watch it even though my kids are “too big.”
Many thanks to the generosity of photographers whose work is shared for free on Unsplash: Andrew Neel, Michael Dziedzic and Juan Gomez.
