The ceramics. I already mentioned the ceramics.
But I want to say more about it because the ceramics are teaching me something I did not expect to be taught at this point in my life, which is what it feels like to do something badly without the badness meaning anything about you. I am bad at the ceramics. I am the worst in the class by a margin I find mildly impressive. My bowls are not symmetric. My walls collapse. I have been at it for four months and my results are the results of someone who has been at it for four months and no amount of effort has yet produced the graceful, even, properly dried thing that the instructor produces with the ease of a person whose hands have been doing this for thirty years.
And no one is grading it.
That is the thing. There is no rubric. There is no committee that will review the bowls and determine whether they meet the criteria for continuation, no contract that is renewed or not renewed based on the quality of the output. The bowls are just bowls. The bad ones are bad. The slightly less bad ones are slightly less bad. The process of making them is enjoyable in a way that has nothing to do with the product, that is in the clay and the wheel and the hands learning something slow and the complete absence of anyone measuring the learning against a standard.
I also bake bread now. The same principle applies.
And I have started drawing. Small things. Plants from the garden, the neighbour’s cat, the view from the window on November mornings. I am not good at the drawing. I do not need to be good at the drawing. The drawing is the act of looking slowly at a thing, so slowly that you have to understand its structure in order to put it down, and the understanding is the point, not the line, not the finished thing, the slowing-down and the seeing.
I spent my whole career being evaluated.
Every course and every paper and every committee hour assessed against a standard, placed in a hierarchy, found adequate or inadequate according to criteria I did not set. The doing-for-no-evaluation is its own education. It is teaching me that the making has value that the assessing of the making cannot access. It is teaching me that the unevaluated life contains things the evaluated one was too busy measuring to notice.
The bowls are getting slightly less bad. I notice this without urgency. That, too, is new.
