Or….Orienteering with Christopher Robin as a metaphor for creativity
A group of us are making our way through Martha Beck’s The Joy Diet, a book devoted to…well, joy. Living a more joyful life by being true to yourself.
Chapter Four is on Creativity, and at one point, she suggests we should all have this statement tattooed on our foreheads:
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
Christopher Robin is an orienteer. A very good one, actually, and he’s been training pretty seriously this year. For those who don’t know what orienteering is, it involves navigating over terrain with a map and a compass to find a series of flags. Much bigger sport in Europe than the US, but of course, CR is British and learned it there. This is an example of a map marked with flag points. (Learn more about the sport here.)
I’ve done a little bit with CR now and then. I don’t tag along to every event, but I do like to go play outside, and there was an event in Buena Vista this weekend, so I happily went with him. The knee has been healing slowly, and a good ramble on the hills seemed like a good test. I signed up for a yellow course (advanced beginner, very easy, mostly on trails).
When we got there Sunday morning, the president of the club talked me into trying an orange, which is intermediate. I protested at first, that I didn’t think I was confident enough, that I get confused with the compass at times, and she nodded, smiling, and showed me a couple of tricks to make it easier, speaking beginner language, which is not–despite his most earnest efforts–something CR can speak. It made a lot more sense.
Because of the knee, I didn’t feel any pressure to actually race or be fast, and really, my instructor was patient. "There’s no hurry," she said. "Just enjoy yourself."
Huh. Enjoy it. Now there’s a thought. Because CR is so good and so fast, I think there was some part of me that didn’t want to embarrass him by being really terrible at it, so I was afraid to take chances, afraid to be really super unbelievably slow, and maybe even completely fail. (Which I did the last time I tried an orange course–DNF, which is did not finish. I actually got hopelessly lost and frustrated and freaked out, which was why I’ve been sticking to yellows).
But it was a beautiful day, the first chance I’ve had to be in the mountains this year, and in a spectacularly beautiful place. I had my handy-dandy camelbak, a Luna bar if I needed it, and I do know how to read a map, so if I got lost, all I had to do was find the trails and roads to bring me back to the start.
I had the best time I’ve ever had orienteering. It took me forever to find the first control, but once I did find it, I could follow a map feature to the next, and then the next. In fact, I did just fine, marking off control after control. Twice, I overshot, then navigated back to where I was meant to be. I was damned slow, but the climbs were substantial and my knee was holding up just fine.
And then, I got lost. I couldn’t find the 8th control in a pile of rocks. I thought I knew where I was, stopped using the compass, and made a big navigation error. I ended up way off course, found the 10th control and noticed the sky was getting black with thunderclouds, so I headed back with a DNF. Technically, a failure.
But in reality, a big success. I learned a lot. I really do know what reentrant is now. Wow, that’s so cool! I do know how to read these maps a lot better. If it had not been my first time out hiking with the still-healing knee, I would have retraced my steps to control #7 and re-navigated to find #8, and what’s more, I knew exactly how to do that.
It’s so much fun to learn new things, especially challenging, difficult things. Orienteering is not rocket science, but it’s not exactly easy, either. What I learned yesterday is that it’s okay to be me, right where I am, learning and growing.
Oh, and I think this will be the next 14-er, I’m going to hike, Mt. Princeton. Fabulously beautiful, no?
What would you like to try that you’ve been nervous about? What might you fail spectacularly at doing–and love trying anyway?
Audition for a play. My old shy comes out on stage, so I would probably freeze up and freak out, but who knows. I think it would be such an amazing experience to be in a play. The last (and only) time I tried out was in high school, and I didn’t make it, and stuck to costuming after that, but I’ve always hovered on the outskirts of theatre–being a thespian vicariously through costuming, or lately through my kids.
Julie, maybe you could try out for a local production, aim for some small part in something that seems fun.
A friend of mine waded into this a couple of years ago and loves it madly.