“Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown”
Claude Bernard
How true. As a novice artisan working with silver to craft beautiful (in my view at least) adornments, it’s a daily challenge to overcome moving from familiar territory to new and still unexplored places. Exciting, yes of course; daunting, even more so. Sometimes so daunting that I will find innumerable reasons to go and tidy the sock drawer!
You won’t believe (unless you’ve been there) how terrifying sitting down with a blank piece of paper in front of you can be. When your inspirational muse is in the mood to play, the design comes swiftly. Then begins the technical analysis of how exactly am I going to construct the piece – will it work in real time? All of this before I pick up a single tool …
Challenges are good, right? The unknown should be a place of adventure, not something to shy away from.
If you think about, every single day we wake up and step out into the unknown – we perceive it as familiar and safe because we do a similar thing most days. But who can know what’s really around the next corner, even one we’ve been around umpteen times before?
If we see every single day as a place of discovery, then the little things really shouldn’t seem quite so big, should they?
Ana
