When a pottery class taught me how to live alive

The slap of the lump of clay onto the bat of the potter’s wheel is so satisfying. And loud. It wakes us up. We are in a sunny shack at the base of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, three friends side by side by side straddling soon-to-be spinning wheels for a two-hour-long pottery class at Sundance Resort.

Sundance outside the art studio on a March afternoon.

Tim, our instructor for the day, is bearded and has reddish hair that skims his shoulders. His voice is encouraging and he laughs easily. He’s casually sealing the clay to the bat while he’s warming us up with a demonstration. Almost-spring sunshine is squinting through the pines into this space filled with blown glass and smelling of homemade lavender soap. He’s setting the wheel in motion with his foot and centering the lump by cupping one wet hand to the side and the other on top. The ball is coaxed into a squat cylinder in seconds.

Not sure what to expect but for sure not conference-style insight.

Tim starts, “you have to find your center first, then you can open up,” he says, without a hint of irony. He’s talking about pottery, but my mind is on the life lessons he’s imparting. Maybe it’s because my friends, Bev and Shelley, are actually here for a business conference that was delayed, ripe for inspiration from Brené Brown and Ellen and Michelle Obama, but this Plan B pottery class is really delivering on wisdom. Or maybe it’s because Bev is on a journey to steer people to Live Alive through a book club style accountability group focused on life stories and achieving big dreams and she leads us to places of great inspiration.

In any case, here’s what we learned:

1. Centering is the hardest and most important.
   In pottery as in life, nothing really works until you’ve found your center. Finding your center requires awareness, attention, and intention. Focus attention to the parts out of whack. Tim comes around to check our work, “when you’re centered (he’s talking about the clay here), you won’t feel any friction really,” he says. “It just kind of works.”
2. You have to push past the messy part.
   As we center the clay, it takes a drizzle of water and a bit of grit. When the wheel is spinning and the rhythm is off, the work begins. “You have to push harder than you think,” he says. “You find the lumps and really lean in on the uneven parts.”

Steady as she goes.

3. Brace yourself to get steady.
The three of us instinctively go into a more active stance, elbows wedged onto aproned legs. With that added stability, things fall into place. “There,” Tim says, “you know it when it’s right. If you don’t feel anything and things run smooth, you’ve centered.”

4. When you go inward, you have to go farther than you think.
“Now you’re ready to shape things,” he says. He places his wet thumbs right in the center of the center and pushes down. “To go inward, you have to go farther than you think.”

5. Sometimes you have to scrap it and start over.
As the wheel spins, a bowl is starting to form, and I want to pull it out in a wider way like Tim has done. The wheels are spinning and we’ve all gone quiet, focused on the task at hand. I hastily start pulling the clay out and the sides get too thin and wobble. It’s already over and I press the ball back together with a smack to start again.

6. I find out then, you can salvage the original plan, it just may be smaller than the first one. And it just might be better. I manage to conjure up a small-ish bowl-cup. I imagine cradling it to sip hot tea from it rather than spooning cereal as was the original plan. And it feels right.

7. You have to play to learn.
Later, we get a second lump “just to play.” We don’t think of the end product, we tinker with shapes and thicknesses and tools and textures. It’s no surprise the second-round bowls and cups and mugs turn out way better. Pressure’s off. We are just “playing.”

We made things!

Like in life, we had to know when to quit fussing and let the pieces just be. Have you heard that acronym ELMO to use when your team is iterating something to death? Enough, let’s move on? That is enough for today. It is time to leave it. More time or another draft will just kill the vibe. I paint one bowl a bright yellow and as I label it with a post-it I can almost hear Brené’s Texas twang, “well isn’t that a happy little imperfect bowl.” Then she gets serious: “There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.”

A conference postponed, but the lessons arrive on time, served up with just the right amount of sunshine and wisdom on a Tuesday afternoon.

Perfect in its imperfection.