Everyday Canvas

New Skills and Desks

August 15

New Skills

Prompt: What is the hardest part about learning a new skill? Do you enjoy a challenge or do you like things to come easily?

The hardest part about learning a new skill is the pre-learning part for me, the deciding of it. Once I set my mind to it, I usually find a way to do it soon enough. As Tolkien says, in the Lord of the Rings, “It's a dangerous business… going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Exactly. Once I get over my initial fear and my mind sets its wheels working on it, I find ways to learn most anything. Fast or well, I cannot vouch for it, but I always find a way, and my favorite way of learning is on my own. Teachers and the regular way of teaching take too long, although I can appreciate their dedication and inclusion of material, of whose existence a solo learner may not be aware of. On the other hand, if I know what the material is and if I can watch its demonstration (say in handcrafts and such), I’m better off going at it on my own.

I guess this means I like a challenge and do not like things given to me in pill form to be swallowed without questions. This is probably why I value the Montessori method of teaching young people.


============================

August 14

Desks

Prompt: What gift in your life has brought you immense joy and made you feel like telling everyone how lucky you are to have it? Do you have desk of your own? Where do you write if you do not have a desk of your own?



When someone trusts me with something, be it a secret or a delicate job or the overseeing of a work I feel I’m capable of doing, I find that to be the best gift for me. In addition, the very best material gift I ever received was a signed book by my uncle, dedicating the book to me.

As to desks, I always had a desk. I received my first desk, in diminutive form when I was four years old, since I had learned how to read on my own by then. When I was a bit older, there was a large desk for everyone in the house. Since I am selfish when it comes to sharing desk-space and I valued my privacy, I asked someone who was throwing away an old table to give it to me. That table became my own desk for many years. I added a small night table with a couple of drawers to its one side and a table-top book shelf to its side top. When my uncle built a large stand-alone book-shelf, I placed it near my personally designed desk, and I was good to go. When my mother wanted to buy me a “better-looking” book-shelf and desk, I refused her gift. Instead, I asked for a charge card to buy books with. This book shelf and combination desk served me well until I married my husband.

Later on, after I was married, hubby caught on to my desk idea and ordered a fancy desk imported from Scandinavia. This was during the mid-sixties and we still have that desk with our first-son’s pencil tip etchings on it as it was made up of soft teak wood. We used to joke that he was establishing his territory like wild animals peeing around a perimeter of savage land.

Today, in addition to hubby’s pencil-etched fancy desk, I have three desks in the house. On the simplest one, stands my sewing machine. On a better one, in the third bedroom, which is “in name” my study, stands a couple of old laptops and a few books, but I never use that desk because hubby wants me nearby. So in our large living space off the kitchen, we both established, about fifteen years ago, our second work corners. This way we work, eat, watch TV, and live together in the same cluttered room.

In that room, my corner has a desk for my laptop and book shelves on the side with a cluttered-wall of family photos and whatever I wish to put up there. Several months ago, I came up with the wild idea of writing while standing up and bought a stand that fits neatly to one corner of the desk. Now the desk has a desk-top book-shelf in addition to the laptop stand and other book shelves on the wall, and it is also serving as another storage place for my wildly penned post-its and pieces of paper and note-books.

Do I have a desk? I guess I do, but same as from the time I was in grade school, I adapt everything to my way of doing things.