Behind the Scenes: Doing things before we are ready

We took my son camping in Sequoia for Mother's Day weekend. It was one of the things we wrote down at the start of the year. A list we keep in the kitchen, half goals and half wishes. "Family Camping" was on it, and for months I kept finding reasons to push it to a later weekend.

I am not a natural camper, but I have always loved being outdoors. I came to camping later than most people. Definitely older than my son is now. I never went every summer the way some kids do, but somewhere along the way I grew into it. The quiet, the smell of dirt warming up in the sun, the way time slows down when there is nothing to plug in.

We had not been camping in a long time. This was our first trip since my son was born. We told ourselves we would leave at sunrise. We left at 9am. There was so much to pack, and so much I almost forgot, and at some point I had to sit on the kitchen floor and decide to give us grace. The trip was already happening.

Also, we did not need to be early.

Just one night, and that was the plan. No screens, no toys. Just the trees and the three of us.

The first afternoon, my toddler ran between the sequoia trees asking for goldfish crackers, then sprinting after squirrels the second he saw one. He spent a long time collecting tree branches to put in our campfire, very seriously, the way toddlers handle important work. We cooked our dinner on the camp stove.

We made s'mores, and he got melted chocolate smeared all over his face. Just today, I did not bother wiping it off.

We slept in the tent pressed close together. I had been worried about the cold and the unfamiliarity. He slept through. We all did, actually. Surprisingly well, for a tent. I woke up at one point and listened to both of them breathing and thought, oh, “We are doing it”.

I have been thinking about that drive home a lot this week, because Paper Bento is asking something similar of me right now. The work I keep flinching from is not the boxes themselves. It is the part where I have to put myself out there and build in public, even before I feel ready to. I am an introvert, and I would much rather hide. Given the choice, I would let the boxes speak for themselves and stay quiet in the background.

But you cannot build a brand from the back of the room. I am learning, slowly, that the work is not just curating the box. It is also letting myself be seen while I figure this out. There are a lot of what ifs. What if people hate this. What if people find me cringe. What if I show up and nobody is there.

What if, what if, what if.

They sit in my chest some mornings before I open my laptop, and I have to physically set them down before I can open my laptop, or hit send on an email.

Everything about this season is chaotic. The May box plan, the open tabs, the half-written ideas, the list of brands I want to learn more about but the to-do lists keep growing.I do not have it all figured out, but the tent worked. The night was warm enough. The trip we kept postponing turned out to be one night, and one night was enough.

I am trusting that this year will work the same way.

 

Thank you for being here while I figure this out. Every kind note, every reply, every quiet read of these letters has made the what ifs a little quieter.

Warmly,

Paper Bento