Dozy Writes

An exciting part of one of my previous jobs was doing health and safety. I know, it’s not the most interesting opening line and I can hear you all groan, but I genuinely loved it and found it fascinating.  

Working in an office was pretty low risk apart from the bull stud farm that the organisation ran which was exceptionally high risk. Yes, I know, you’re wondering if you read that right, and you did – the organisation ran a bull stud farm that bred bulls which would then get hired out to local communities who used the bull to improve their cattle stock. 

I know you’re probably now thinking of bulls strutting around to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ but I am unable to confirm if that was the case. Thankfully the farm manager dealt with that side whilst I concentrated on the office based employees. 

The office based employees had a much more sedate time than their colleagues working at the farm although some of them occasionally had to go out on site visits in rural areas where there were some increased risks including the possibility of biting dogs and crofters armed with shotguns. 

It was never a dull place to work but for the most part I dealt with fairly routine office related issues. The main danger in an office is the potential injuries that can be sustained whilst working at a desk.  Now, you might be thinking what on earth could go wrong sitting at a desk. 

Musculoskeletal injuries, that’s what.

Just the mere act of sitting at a desk can cause back pain and repetitive strain injuries. It turns out that it’s not very good for us to be sitting down for so long.

I was responsible for completing desk assessments for my colleagues and I loved it. It gave me the chance to have a blether with a colleague – that means a chat for the non-Scots among you. 

I got to use my lux light meter which wasn’t strictly necessary but I liked bringing it out regardless because I quite like a gadget. I also got to tell people how to do things which I used to be a big fan of although I have been trying to step away from that tendency in recent years.

So this has been a very long and meandering introduction where I can now disclose that I, a trained health and safety professional, have been very naughty over the last couple of years in that I haven’t had a proper desk set up when I’ve been writing. 

Mainly because I haven’t had a desk. 

Or a house. 

In fact, all I’ve had is a suitcase which has been used as a temporary desk on many occasions whilst waiting for a train.

Anyway, I now have my own desk for some of the year so I was busy fixing it up with what I needed. I don’t have an adjustable chair and I realised that my chair was just a little bit too high so I decided to make myself a foot rest. 

I dug out some of the famous T-shirt yarn that I had leftover from my last craft project and I started to crochet a big circular affair that could double up as a pouffe.

I didn’t have a pattern so I decided to just crochet and see how it turned out. I ended up learning a few interesting things along the way.

I’m not quite as bothered about the aesthetics of a space as I used to be.

Sure, any normal person would just buy a footrest or a pouffe, there are thousands on the market and they’re not that expensive. A nice one from Amazon or IKEA would look neat and professional underneath my desk. 

Pah! That may be true but I am on a tight budget and I enjoy creating something so it was more fun to do it this way. 

Plus I have started to enjoy having more of a ‘make do and mend’ attitude. I don’t want to keep buying lots of things so I’d rather try and create something out of materials that I already have and I must admit to enjoying the challenge of making something out of very little.

I’m not phased by the absence of a pattern or a template.

I have never been scared of making craft projects without a pattern, I can happily pick up a crochet hook and some wool and just wing it. And yet I found myself being incredibly regimented about following a template in our biggest project – that of living. 

For years, I was constantly trying to follow the social construct templates others had set in life. I think we all have a tendency to follow the patterns set by either our family or our peers but none of those templates ever worked for me. In fact, I often felt like a failure because the template didn’t fit me right.

It’s understandable that we follow templates and patterns, we all have to learn somehow so it makes sense to follow one that works for someone else. That said, it’s nice to add your own flair to it. When I’m cooking a meal or creating something with crochet, I often use a recipe or a pattern as a starting point before branching out and adding in little bits that will work better for me.

It took me a long time to realise that just like I do with recipes and crochet projects, I could add my own flair to life’s templates or even work without them at times.

We are all unique and what works for one person might not work for another. That doesn’t mean one template is right and the other is wrong, instead I have learned to accept that there are multiple ways to achieve something.

I have endless patience to keep unravelling my crochet projects and starting afresh again without any feelings of being a failure. Nor do I experience the accompanying feelings of shame or frustration. Instead, I just smile to myself and start again.

I’d never thought about this before but I realised that I’ve been happy to practise and rework a crochet project in a way that I haven’t historically approached other endeavours in life.

I’ve always suffered from the affliction of wanting to be able to do everything perfectly and as a result I have seen the act of making a mistake or having to start over again as some kind of failure.

What nonsense! None of us are failures just because we have to start something again. I would argue that starting something afresh leads to a deeper understanding of how it works and it can be much easier to spot any issues when you’ve taken a step back and gone back to the foundations of something. 

So having recognised that I’ve been happy to tinker with my crochet projects and that I also feel safe in the knowledge that the more I practise, the more I’ll develop my skills, I feel more inclined to try and bring that same attitude to the bigger things in life.

Making a mistake is normal and doesn’t automatically mean that everything is ruined.

Firstly, we are often the only ones who see the flaws, and things don’t need to be perfect to be interesting. In fact, there’s probably an argument that if we were to meet a perfect person – should such a person exist – we would be bored because I imagine their perfection would make them incredibly dull. 

Think about how we learn from experience – we don’t learn something when everything goes perfectly, we learn when we step back and reflect on it all after it goes wrong.

I suspect we’d also have hardly any stories to tell if we were all perfect. Some of my best stories come from times when I made mistakes. There’d be no entertainment in a perfect world.

My love of risk assessments hasn’t always had a positive effect on me.

When I first learned how to do them in a work setting, I realised that it felt like a familiar task because I’d been doing them constantly since I was small – on a scale that perhaps wasn’t as common as I had assumed.

My ability to recognise changes in patterns and identify hazards and risks from a mile off sometimes means that I have a tendency to focus on the anomalies, the parts that are wrong, rather than the parts that are good and working well.

It reminds me of the story I heard a few years back called ‘Two Bad Bricks’ by Ajahn Brahm, the abbot of a Buddhist monastery in Western Australia.

Many years ago, the monks bought a large piece of land to build a monastery in Serpentine, Western Australia. There was no money left to pay builders after the cost of purchasing the land so the monks all learned some building skills and built everything themselves.

Ajahn Brahm was a young man at the time and was tasked with building a wall. When he finished it, he noticed that he had misplaced two bricks and they were in fact wonky. He was so annoyed and he couldn’t see anything other than the two wonky bricks.

He wanted to tear down the wall and start again but he was told he couldn’t. The wall had to stay as it was.

Sometime later, a visitor to the monastery commented that it was a nice wall. Ajahn Brahm was astounded and asked the visitor if he was unable to see the two bad bricks. The visitor replied that yes, he could see them, but he could also see the 998 perfect bricks that surrounded them.

Ajahn Brahm realised that by focusing so strongly on the two wonky bricks, he had neglected to see the remaining bricks which were perfectly placed.

It’s important to look at the bigger picture and appreciate what went well rather than becoming hung up with any perceived failures.

This story continues to resonate with me and I find myself retelling it whenever I feel that I am getting too hung up on what is ‘wrong’ and neglecting to look at what is going well. 

Back to the crochet

I appreciate that it seems as if there were rather a lot of revelations from the mere act of crocheting a pouffe, but I find it helpful to equate these smaller tasks to the bigger picture projects in life.

Reflecting on this has made me realise that I already have the ability to take the time to practise and to stop seeing things as a failure. I do it confidently when I work on craft projects so there is no reason why I can’t transfer those skills across to how I live my life.

When I worked in HR I advised recruiting managers to focus on transferable skills. Just because a candidate hadn’t applied their skills in the specific environment we were looking for didn’t mean that they didn’t possess them.

Perhaps it’s time to start taking my own advice and recognise the wealth of transferable skills that I already possess.