I'm working on this bracelet design today that incorporates chips of tourmaline and copper wire into chain links. I'm making each link and threading them together as I'm wrapping them, not with jumprings. My thought is that the structural integrity of such a design would be superior to one that might be slightly easier to put together (i.e. one using jumprings or eyepins to join the links). It's a bit tricky in the fabrication, but I feel like that will be rewarded with the longevity of the piece. Not to mention that it just looks cooler with all those copper coils framing each chip of tourmaline.
Perhaps inevitably, with 13 links and 12 dangling "charms" made the similarly (custom headpins with beads that are threaded into the links of the bracelet rather than being attached by jumprings), something was bound to go wrong along the way. Either a work hardened wire would snap at an inopportune moment or a bead would shatter or something. Well, one of those things went wrong about halfway through the links. As I was cutting the coil around one bead, with the next link already attached, my wire cutters slipped and I shattered a bead. There was no unwinding the wire to string a new bead on and try again. I had to cut that link off, scrap that wire and figure out what to do next as I stared at this piece of beaded chain with two ends of closed loops.
My "oh shit" moment was just that, a moment, and then I cut a fresh piece of wire and made a fresh loop to hook into one end and get the links going again. But during that "oh shit" moment, I thought all was lost. I thought of the hour I spent last night making the beginnings of these links and the cost of the wire wasted and tried to think how else I could salvage it or if I could just attach some chain and make it just sort of half beaded bracelet or something. But I was in the throes of despair for a moment. It was only a moment, but the despair was very real and very heavy, even crushing. But as I opened myself to the solution, it seemed so very obvious and probably would have come to me instantly had I not taken that moment to despair.
Then, I had a bit of an epiphany moment. I realized that most moments of despair are just like this one was: unnecessary obstacles in the path of success. And I started to think about fear as a particular brand of despair. Fear is often irrational, based on some hypothetical situation that may or may not come to fruition. Fearing something, even something that may likely happen doesn't help you to overcome that situation when it actually presents itself. Fear can sometimes save your life. It's an evolutionary response for a reason. But there's an evolutionary step that's often missing, to push past the fear into the solution.
Fear of failure, and the even more irrational fear of success, have been obstacles in my path for far too long. They've kept me stagnant when I should have been active. Kept me distracted when I should have been focused. With this minor hiccup which caused such intense, momentary panic behind me, I was able to see that I sort of manifested this little challenge to help me practice setting aside my fear-based despair in order to find a solution to a problem that presented itself. And as soon as I start looking at things as challenges instead of seeing them as yet another thing that's going to knock me down or hold me back, the solutions materialize just as instantly as the problem and the subsequent despair did.
As soon as I start seeing failures as the little things they actually are instead of the huge monsters I've made them out to be, I can conquer anything that comes my way.
And that's my little nugget of wisdom from the jewelry bench today.
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