Let’s Try This Again

The theme of the week is let’s try this again. Or it’s one step forward, two steps back. Or maybe perhaps it’s two steps forward, one step back, she says optimistically. Whether it’s work getting done next door (yes, still) or buying stuff for this house including the (hopefully complete) dinnerware quest or my own design work, things haven’t always gone smoothly on the first attempt.

The theme of the week is patience. After the initial freakouts or the early disappointment there is a sense of calm and then weirdly, wonderfully there is hope. Sure things didn’t go as smoothly as we hoped, but then there are second chances, and some of these take twos are better than the take ones.

Photo of a watercolor and ink illustration of a vintage Volkswagen Beetle with sunflowers. — Earlier this summer I painted this little doodle of a VW bug, but this wasn’t my first attempt. My first attempt only looked vaguely Beetleish. I know this one’s not perfect, but at least you can probably tell what kind of car it is!

In our instant gratification, now, now, now society it’s a reminder to be patient. Some are better at patience than others. I am reminded of our family printer. Back in the 1990s we had a computer hooked up to a printer in our kitchen. Why the kitchen? I don’t know, but that’s just where so many families kept their PCs back then. I guess it was considered an appliance, a somewhat less useful dishwasher. Maybe it was because the kitchen also tended to be where the main house phone always was.

This computer was used by various members of the household for doing things like printing out school papers or type-written letters. I think every family had that one member who was the tech support person. In my family that was me. Let me be clear, I was not some sort of computer expert, by any stretch. I was just a smidgeon more tech savvy than everyone else in the household.

Probably something like 90 percent of the tech support requests I fielded were “Help! The printer’s not printing, again!” With the exclamation marks. There was always a freakout accompanying these support requests, because whatever the printer wasn’t printing was some vital important thing on which the fate of the entire universe hinged, or something like that.

Here’s the thing. Every time, without fail, the cause of the printer malfunction would be the same. I would sit down at the misbehaving computer, calmly open up the print queue and see that there were something like 20 print jobs waiting. The printer was overwhelmed. These were not 20 different jobs to be printed. These were simply the same file that the humble printer had been tasked with printing 20 times because one of my impatient family members had attempted to print their document, and when it didn’t instantly appear, hit the print button again, and again, and again. Long before anyone begged their viewers to “smash that like button” my family was smashing the print button like there was no tomorrow. The malfunctioning printer problem was easy to fix. Patience could have prevented it entirely.

Writing is about patience. First drafts are ugly and messy, but that’s okay. Have patience with yourself, have patience with your work. As many a wise author has said, writing is rewriting. If you don’t have patience, writing probably isn’t for you. But better yet, strive to become more patient. It will serve you well not just in writing, but in life.

This week has been challenging in so many ways, but there’s something to be said for second drafts and second chances. If you too have found that your first attempts have failed, here’s hoping that your second go is waiting and better.

— Alissa