This week I’ve been sewing myself a pair of pants. Loose-fitting, double-pleated pants in emerald green, feather-weight corduroy.
It is a fact about sewing
(and pretty much any other craft) that I cannot complete a project without
mishap. I only use one pattern for pants, but I always seem to be making some
minor change—trying to deal with their distressing tendency to split in the
seat, or else fiddling with the waistline yet again to keep it current with my
own.
Even when I don’t run
into trouble with the changes I’m making, there’s usually a piece that gets
sewn wrong-side out, or a seam that extends where it should not. Or something
completely different—this time I spent over half an hour searching for my seam
ripper, which eventually turned up under a sofa cushion. It’s frustrating.
So why am I sewing pants
instead of buying them? Granted, stores don’t carry pants that meet all my
criteria. (Double-pleats, loose-fitting, not too tight at the waist but not too
loose in the seat, soft fabric, useful pockets…) Still, I could probably pay a
sewing pro to stitch up a pair to my specifications. I could even get them to
finish the seams properly, which I haven’t done for this pair.
Maybe it’s the same as my
reason for trying to make French bread. It’s the challenge of
the thing.
That’s probably part of
it, but I don’t think the situation is quite parallel. At any rate, while
thinking about this, two other things kept coming to mind. The first is a comment
that my husband made. It echoes something in a book by Stephanie Pearl McPhee, the Yarn Harlot. If I could remember which book, I would quote it, since she puts
things so wonderfully. But I can’t, so I’ll have to approximate.
Knitting projects, like
sewing projects, often go awry. Knitters end up ripping out mistakes and having
to re-knit chunks of their project. Other times, they discover that the size
small sweater has somehow turned out to be a giant’s size small. And so forth.
Unless the knitter is restrained and keeps her frustrations to herself, at some
point her spouse may inquire, “Do you really enjoy knitting?”
It’s a reasonable
question, given the amount of grumbling.
And the answer is, “Yes,
I really do enjoy knitting.” Even if this blasted hat won’t go around my head….
Grumble grumble.
It’s easy to see how
sewing projects and knitting projects are connected. Less clear is why I kept
thinking of a section from a book I had recently looked at, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, by Daniel M. Haybron. The part that struck me
actually comes right near the beginning of the book. First, the author comments
on an experience that led him to the topic of the book. He used to spend
summers on a small fishing island as a child, and remembers it as being a very
different world, a good place to be, “the only place I’ve ever felt like a
fully developed human being.” Later, he compares two hypothetical societies, A
and B, and describes them like this:
“Consider then, two
communities, A and B. A typical member of A, on a typical day, is in more or
less the following condition: at ease, untroubled, slow to anger, quick to
laugh, fulfilled, in an expansive and self-assured mood, curious and attentive,
alert and in good spirits, and fully at home in her body, with a relaxed,
confident posture. A denizen of B, by contrast, is liable to be: stressed,
anxious, tense, irritable, worried, weary, distracted and self-absorbed,
uneasy, awkward and insecure, spiritually deflated, pinched and compressed. The
differences, let us suppose, owe mainly to difference in the prevailing ways of
life in these communities.”
A bit later he says,
“Notice that the
descriptions of A and B made no explicit reference to happiness or unhappiness.
But it should be reasonably apparent that, nonetheless, happiness is precisely
what they were about: what A has in its favor is that its residents tend to be
happy, whereas the people of B tend not to be.”
What has this got to do
with my experience sewing pants? I’ve just said that sewing includes a
significant amount of time spent fussily trying to adjust the pattern and then
discovering that I’ve messed up and must rip out some seams, all of which tends
to produce frustration and anger. The author’s description of society A
involves people feeling good in
various ways, while it is society B
that is described as habitually tense and frustrated.
But then I thought about
the origin of his example—the island community that he described and the hard
work of its inhabitants—and the fact that they undoubtedly had moments of
similar frustration in making things work, but also presumably moments of great
satisfaction with their work and its results. I thought about the fact that I
genuinely do enjoy sewing, and what that means, and I’ve come up with two
possible connections:
1. Enjoyable activities don’t always look
enjoyable.
2. "Difficult" doesn't equal "not happy-making."
I’m stuck for a
conclusion here. It seems trite to conclude simply that worthwhile activities
involve some work, some parts that aren’t fun—but isn’t that what I’m saying?
Or is there something more?
Maybe if I reread the
book, which I don’t remember very well, I’ll have more to say. Meanwhile, I’ve
got a nice new pair of pants.
If there is no struggle, the reward would be less. If a video game had the player meet and defeat the boss in the first scene, it would be too easy, boring.
ReplyDeleteWhen learning, the happiness or contentment comes after success or perseverance. Not instant gratification.
Good point! Though I think there's some happiness in the process too... unless it goes badly wrong, maybe? Further thought-- how do we balance activities that are pleasant as they are (watching a movie? going for a walk?) with challenging ones?
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