The other day I was telling a friend about my struggles learning a new language. I took a class at a local community college and, while I made some progress over the quarter, I felt like it was a slow start.
"It's too hard. I'm just bad at languages." I said. He pushed back. "No, you're not." I explained to him that I'm not good at memorization. He asked me what my phone number was. I told him. "See. You can memorize things." He said. "You need to relax, believe that you can do it and, he added with emphasis, you need to keep it fun."
I realized today, as I thought about this conversation, that his advice applies to learning to weave just as it does to language learning.
I remember a class I taught years ago where one student was frustrated with the tapestry she was weaving. She hadn't woven quite as much as some of the other students and she was starting to compare her progress to theirs. At one point she commented that she thought that weaving was simply too difficult for her. I looked at her piece and I couldn't see what she saw. It was great. This student was exactly where she needed to be, but she couldn't see that because her mind was made up: She wasn't good weaving just like I'm not good at learning languages.
I hope that that student continued to weave after the class and realized that she WAS good at weaving. We can ALL be good at weaving or languages or cooking or painting in our own right. We just need to believe that we can be.
And we need to keep it fun.
