Free to Fail

I did a thing today…

Any guesses?

Try again. Nope, definitely not that. Okay, I’ll just tell you because you’re never gonna guess.

I painted 100 (3/4”) wooden balls, in 9 different colors. It was pretty rough and definitely exhausting. A friend recently passed along a game called ColorKu*. The premise is that it’s Sudoku but with colors instead of numbers. I love it because I love Sudoku, so I will genuinely enjoy playing it for fun to relax and rest, but also because I think it’ll be a fun way to teach the kids how to play Sudoku. Anyways, it was missing a few balls, so I thought I’d just paint a few unfinished ones the missing colors. But naturally, being true to who I am, I decided a better idea would be to paint a minimum of 81 balls, plus extras, in a color scheme I found relaxing and loved to look at. Well… I won’t do that again. They have imperfections all over them and are unevenly coated in places, in spite of multiple coats. Just imagine doing multiple coats of 9 colors and then turning them by hand on a cooling rack so they don’t dry funky.

The point of this post isn’t to share my method or even tell you that I painted some wooden balls fun colors. I wanted to share with you what happened next as I processed the whole thing. (One of the reasons I love creating is it allows my mind the space and freedom to just think and process. It’s so needed and refreshing.) Initially, I felt agitated that this project was a fail and wasn’t going according to the plan. I was seriously entertaining the idea of just calling it quits. But after just a few moments of persevering, I came up with a method that gave me better results and it felt so good to not quit, even though the results were definitely sub par. It felt good to finally complete a task that I’d been thinking about doing for weeks. And, best of all, it felt good to realize, and even celebrate, that painting wooden balls are not my thing. Wohoo! I am not going to be a wooden ball painter for my career or hobby!! We have a joke in our family where when I fail at something or just don’t seem to be good at it, I enthusiastically yell a proclamation that I’m not good at said thing and that I don’t enjoy it. While I didn’t do it in this instance, it would’ve been the perfect setting to do so. So here goes nothing…

I AM NOT GOOD AT PAINTING TINY WOODEN BALLS AND I DON’T ENJOY IT!!!
*Said with a giant smile on my face because it feels so good to just acknowledge it.

So yeah, it wasn’t fun and I won’t do that again, but I’m so glad I did it. If I’m ever in a life or death situation that requires knowing how to paint tiny wooden balls, I will survive. What a relief! All in all though, I checked another thing off the “I should try…” list and I’m glad I did. It’s almost just as much fun as finding the things you are good at.

If you were free to fail, and not be good at something, what would you try?

I think it might be time to try… I’m just saying.

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