You Don’t Have to See the Whole Path to Begin

What a two-day silversmithing class taught me about starting small.

I didn’t start Plein De Vie Jewelry by deciding I was going to become a silversmith.

There was no business plan.

No collection mapped out.

No grand vision of where it would all lead.

I started with a two-day silversmithing class in Vancouver.

That was it.

I learned to use a jeweller’s saw. I pierced silver. I discovered how much I didn’t know.

And I loved it.

Looking back now, I think there’s something important in that little beginning.

Because so often we convince ourselves that before we start something, we need to know exactly where it’s going.

We want the plan.

We want certainty.

We want to know all that effort will be worth it.

But some of the most meaningful things in my life didn’t begin that way at all.

I’ve Rarely Had the Whole Map

When I was younger, I certainly couldn’t have predicted the life I’m living today.

Raising my daughter while working and going to university. A corporate career. Leaving that career and moving to British Columbia. Years of consulting. Retirement at 54.

And somewhere along the way, jewelry.

None of those chapters arrived with the next ten steps neatly laid out in front of me.

Usually, I could see only the next one.

So I took it.

And when the time came, I took another.

Maybe that’s why that little two-day class feels more significant to me now than it did at the time.

I didn’t need to know where it would lead.

I just needed to be curious enough to begin.

Being a Beginner Is Uncomfortable

There’s something humbling about being a beginner when you’ve spent decades becoming capable.

We know how to do our jobs. We know how to manage our homes and our lives. We’ve accumulated years of experience.

And then we decide to try something completely new.

Suddenly, we don’t know what we’re doing.

I certainly didn’t walk into my first silversmithing class knowing how to turn a piece of silver into something beautiful.

I had to learn how to hold the saw.

How much pressure to use.

How to follow a line.

How to recover when something didn’t go quite as planned.

And then I had to practice.

Again. And again.

Eventually I started making things.

Not perfect. Not fully formed.

But they were mine.

There is something rather wonderful about giving yourself permission to be a beginner.

You don’t have to be good at something yet.

You only have to be willing to learn.

Small Doesn’t Mean Insignificant

That first class was only two days.

It would have been very easy to see it as simply something interesting I’d tried.

But I kept going.

One piece led to another.

Practice became progress.

And today I can walk into my studio overlooking Okanagan Lake and see what grew from that beginning.

The tools.

The workbench.

The pieces waiting to be finished.

The designs scribbled down because an idea arrived when I wasn’t expecting it.

The jewelry that has gone home with women I’ve met at markets, through my website, and sometimes through a conversation that began with, “Could you make...?”

That process of turning an idea into something tangible is still