Helping my niece decorate.

I got to spend some time with my 3-year-old niece this past week. (Yay!)  She is smart, funny and tidy. So when we took on the project of making a gingerbread house, we tried to be organized and orderly.

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Strike one.

Pretty quickly, her mom and I realized that it would have been a good idea to do a little more prep. As soon as we opened the box and read all the instructions (okay 75% of the instructions), we realized that we should have assembled the house ahead of time because the two separate construction steps called for 10-15 minutes for the icing (i.e. mortar) to set. And, that 10 – 15 minutes really could have been 45 minutes to hour. Oops! (At least the gingerbread was already baked. *smile*)

So we assembled the four walls and set a timer to wait for 15 minutes. While we waited, we distributed the decorations into different bowls. With a plan to work on puzzles for the rest of the drying time, we were good to go.

Then we added the roof and waited — you guessed it — another 15 minutes of drying time. Back to do more puzzles and we were still having a pretty fun time.

(Still … ten to fifteen minutes is an eternity to a three-year-old, even a pretty patient three-year-old like my niece.)

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Now let me just say that when completely dry, the icing  provided in our gingerbread kit became stronger than concrete, but while moist it was … um … shall we say …. pliable.

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So it’s been 40 minutes or so, we’ve completed 4 or 5 puzzles and we (finally!) have the walls up and the roof attached. Time to decorate!

We put our little Virgo in her painter’s smock and bring our bowls of decorations to her work table. She begins to press candies onto our gingerbread house.

This is the moment that the art we expected to make becomes the art we are actually making.

Little Bit pushes a piece of candy firmly onto the roof which causes the entire structure to shift and lean to one side. (Uh oh, strike two.)

Then one side of the roof begins to slide off the house. There’s a small outcry of alarm (from all three of us) before we leap into action. It’s okay, there’s three of us. I hold the structure in place while Mommy and Niece continue to decorate (and take some pictures!)

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Our gingerbread house continues to … er … settle. The walls tilt inward, the roof slides off. My niece – who is neat and orderly and perhaps not so excited about getting sticky in the first place — lets out another small whimper.

Fortunately, my sister-in-law is an art teacher and I’m an improviser. *smile*

“Look!’ I say, “Our gingerbread house is like a snowman, it’s melting!” My niece looks at me suspiciously, but the whimper stops.

“We’re making art,” says her mom, “Art isn’t always about the product, it’s about the process. This process is FUN!”

And, with that, we changed a potentially disastrous project into a fun and creative process. My niece kept working until she had emptied all of the bowls (she’s a finisher, just like her auntie) and then we counted to three, let go of the structure and celebrated as it “melted.”

After all, being creative is largely about the process, not the product.

The finished “product.”

Happy Holidays!

P.S. Our plan for any future gingerbread houses — since my niece doesn’t really like sweets — is to hot glue the structure together beforehand and save the frosting for the decorating. *smile*

Our parents were right to council us to say thank you. Thanking people is important.

Why? Because it provides an opportunity to quantify just what someone did to help you and how it helped. And if the help wasn’t exactly what you asked for, that’s a good thing to figure out, too.

Maybe you got more (or better stuff) than you asked for. Maybe you’ll learn that your requests could be clearer.

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I have a friend who hand writes and mails (or hand delivers) wonderful thank you notes. She sent me one when she graduated from school. In fact, she sent them to everyone she felt had helped her earn her degree — her teachers, her friends and her family.

She was genuinely surprised at how touched people were by the gesture. She said to me “Don’t people thank people anymore?” “Not like that, ” I replied.

Think about how many hand-written thank you notes you’ve received. Now, think about how you feel about the people who’ve taken the time to thank you in that way.

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Try to thank people before, during and after they’ve helped you. It keeps you tapped in to the help people (or the Universe) are providing. So even when there is no specific person to thank, why not take time to appreciate and express gratitude for the progress you’ve made?

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Thank you for reading this blog, coming to hear me sing, singing with me and all the other support you have provided for my music-making endeavors.

So I have been thinking about discomfort.

We have all have different relationships and comfort (haha) levels with being uncomfortable and those relationships and levels change throughout our lives.

We are set up to be uncomfortable all the time when we are young. We experience it so often, however, that we don’t even label it as discomfort. We go to preschool or kindergarten, we grow out of cribs and clothes, we enter a new grade, we switch to a new school or start thinking about what to do after school. As I said to one of my high school students this past week, we expect things of young people that we no longer do ourselves “Here is something you’ve never done before, go do it!” “Here is a subject you have never studied before, go learn it!” or “Here is another group of kids you don’t know, go make friends!” (Or, in my case, here’s a new song/band/ensemble/venue, go create!)

So it seems that the older we get, the fewer experiences we have that cause discomfort. Perhaps we are even trying to avoid discomfort? (Not you, of course, but sometimes I do. *wink*)

Feeling comfortable is easier; we know what we’re doing and what is expected of us. It can also be hard to notice. Comfortable is/feels normal. So, in a sense, it is the absence of feelings. Discomfort, on the other hand, is definitely noticeable. It feels itchy or unsure or makes us mildly anxious.

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For the past couple of months, I have been trying to observe when I feel uncomfortable. For example, I took a workshop last month and, at the beginning, I noticed that I was uncomfortable. I knew about half the folks, but we were there to learn/explore a new modality and I didn’t know what to expect. More of an issue (for me) was that I didn’t know what might be expected of me.

I realized it had been a while since I had felt this way.

In fact, I’d been feeling pretty comfortable for a while. I figured out how and what (and in what order) to teach my students, I understood the in’s and out’s of my many job(s), and I’d been getting to work with the same singers and players pretty regularly. All pretty comfortable.

So if everything is comfortable and working, why change anything?

Well, we can miss opportunities for growth and learning if we’re comfortable all of the time. If everything’s good, then what makes us seek out new friends, move to new cities, or start new jobs? Why learn or write new songs or work with new players? (Why quit your day job and go to music school?)

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I think we have to practice being uncomfortable. That, when done often, being uncomfortable keeps us flexible and makes us more empathetic to the needs and comforts of others. We can take a broader view of situations and consider that others may be feeling discomfort, too. (I will definitely think about my experience in that workshop when I teach my own workshops later this month.)

Most important, we learn that feeling comfortable is not the same thing as being safe.