The Touchwood Project

“If I didn’t care what people thought, I’d…”

I’d write on the blog about what I’m thinking about with Touchwood and life. I’d share this North Star stuff, the ever-changing plans and dreams, different projects I’m working on.

The above sentences are from my notebook as part of an exercise from the book Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the life you were meant to live. There are a series of sentences along the lines of “If I were sure I’d succeed, I’d…” and “If I had the nerve, I’d…”.

So I dutifully wrote down my answers only to reach the end of the exercise where the author, Martha Beck, says:

Now I’d like you to choose one of your answers that is neither illegal nor physically dangerous and do it. Right now, before you’re sure that it’s fail-safe, or acceptable, or risk-free. When you’re finished with that item, pick another one, and do that one too. Yes, I know you’ll be breaking the Rules. I don’t care. The needs for certainty and permission are electric fences in your mind. Which would be worse: whizzing all over them or permanently forfeiting all of the things you wrote on the list above?

What? I have to actually do what I just wrote?

So here I am, writing, a part of me convinced that no one’s reading this anyway because it’s so self-indulgent. So New Agey.

But then I think “Hey, it’s the New Year, 2010, and it’s the time to do things that scare us.”

The thing is, I do think we’re doing a lot of exciting things with Touchwood and in our day-to-day lives (which is really one and the same), but I always feel I need to get it close to perfect, tidied up enough so that it will make sense and be appreciated by you, the reader.

I imagine you wouldn’t really be interested in our ideas and projects until I can figure out how to make them more accessible, more usable and relevant to you. I mean, ideas are one thing, but it’s the actual doing of it that’s the real value, right?

Because we’ve got enough people just talking about their lives, and I wouldn’t want to bore people by droning on about ours. So I’ve stuck with tutorials or helpful articles, things I think you might want to hear about.

Problem with that is, it requires so much work to do them you don’t often ever get to see them, and I’m starting to think perhaps I need to be less perfect and just do it. Maybe sharing some of our ideas without everything else might be interesting too.

Latest work-in-progress: Make your own boot liners

For example, I’m working on designing and sewing up my own wellie boot liners to keep my feet toasty and dry:

While I’m excited about sharing that with you, I feel like I need to do a whole bunch of things first before I can write about it here. Things like:

• testing them out in different conditions to see how the design holds up and whether it should be reworked
• drawing the pattern (currently fashioned out of plastic shopping bags) in Photoshop so it’s perfect and you’ll be able to print it out at home
• figuring out how to size it down or up so you can adjust it to your foot size
• finding all the links to the sites you’ll need to get supplies, both for the UK and the US
• taking photos of all the stages of construction
• writing clear, easy-to-follow instructions and testing them out

So uh, that’s a lot to do before I can write about it.

The problem is, aside from the amount of work involved, once I’ve done all that I’m kind of bored with the project and ready to move on to something else. So while we actually do quite a few projects, we don’t tell you about most of them because we’ve already moved on.

Which brings me back to this little North Star exercise.

Sharing the less than perfect stuff

I’m going to take a gamble and start writing about the projects in progress, rather that waiting until they’re good enough to feel I can tell you about them.  I hope it’s of value to you, either as something you can then do yourself or as entertainment.

And while I’m at it, I’d like to share not just the DIY projects, but some of our thoughts and more abstract ideas too in the hopes that they help or inspire you — at least in the “I thought I was the only one!” kind of way. We’re pretty ace at doing things the odd way, the kooky way, so if you feel like a dork or outcast, don’t. Because we know just what you mean and applaud you.

All the little but shrill voices of fear

It’s scary to do this because I just keep imagining all these people rolling their eyes, thinking how we’re such dreamers, that we’re not actually practical or achieving anything, all we do is talk about things and kind of half-assed do them. They whisper derision, masquerading as “But I’m just trying to be practical/helpful/realistic.”

Well, my answer is I am a dreamer and a thinker, but I’m also a doer. I’m less good at the doing maybe, and I’m definitely not the detail-oriented person who dots the is and crosses the ts, but I do get enough done and that’s just going to have to suffice.

Someday I hope to find those detailed, see-the-thing-through-right people because I know we need them in the long run to make Touchwood work. But in the meantime we’re just getting on with what we can do.

Let’s see, another little voice of fear I can hear in my head warns me that people reading this will think how they’d do it way better than that, that I’m so foolish, so ignorant for thinking my way could ever work.

OK, well if anyone out there reads about a project we’re doing and thinks they can do it better, I hope they’ll let us know. I like ideas for improvement.

The last little voice says that this all sounds suspiciously like self-help, all very American, and all I can say in reply is, “Then don’t read it.” You probably won’t have read this far in this post anyway, but for the benefit of my self-doubt, I’d say that personal development is basically the pursuit of happiness and what better goal than that? What could possibly be more important than understanding yourself, what a fulfilling life means to you, and what you have to offer the world? If you think thinking about stuff like that is a waste of time, then you won’t be interested in what we’re doing anyway.

So on to the positive. I’ll write for those of you out there who are interested in what makes for a happy, fulfilled life. Who find making things yourself, especially out of things you’ve already got or that are inexpensive or easy to get, a lot of fun.

I’ll write to those of you who see clearly the threats to a good life, to our environment through the endless buying of stuff and the pressure to always work harder, and believe that the best way to deal with that is to follow what makes you happy, cultivate adaptability and learn how to do things that matter.

Creating the tribe

Seth Godin says in his book Tribes that we should all be leaders, we should stop catering to the masses and focus instead on finding our tribe and leading from our own unique perspective. We should stop trying to fit in and should embrace standing out because, no matter how bizarre or far out you are, there are others out there like you. And they’re waiting to hear from others like them.

Like Star Trek fans who live in uniform 24/7, or people who spin yarn out of their pets’ hair.

Or maybe a couple who live on a remote island and like to go without electricity once a month, don’t have a car, live on £12,000 a year, and who spend hours every single day just talking to each other.

I’ll do my best then to share with you our ideas as well as our little projects that make life more interesting, fun or comfortable. I’ll talk about where we are with Touchwood, how it’s continually evolving, what we’re learning — because it’s a lot, and it’s exciting. To us, anyway and hopefully to you too.

I’ll be writing to our very own tribe because I believe we have much ahead of us to do and now is the time to start doing it.

,

Tags: happiness, personal development

Trackback URI | Comments RSS