experience

I know I already blogged today, but I meant to post about this yesterday...

M and I had an interesting little conversation this weekend, and it turns out he'd gotten an email earlier in the week that involved the same topic. The internet is sucking the life out of a lot of our experiences. If you research something to the point of being an expert before you ever try anything hands-on, where's the fun? If I had started my little gardening hobby by doing excessive research, I think I would've chickened out. I would've known too much about what could have gone wrong. Instead, I've actually enjoyed my little failures, and truly appreciated my successes.

Anyway, I was telling M how much I loved that about gardening and composting...the learning process. The "figuring it out at kitchen tables." I'm the same with sewing. The same with art. The same with parenting. The same with cooking. I've found that the things I throw myself into with fairly reckless abandon (okay, a pretty calculated amount of reckless abandon) are the things that have made me happiest in life.

It's the exhaustive details of things that wear me out.

I desperately want to create an environment where S can learn through her experiences. I want her to know that it can be a good thing to fail...as long as you fail from trying. As long as you can learn from the failures. I desperately want to remember this idea every single day.