The beauty of beginning again

Yesterday, I shared that I had signed up for a two-day stained glass window making workshop. Today was day two. If I'm honest, I had walked in with the quiet confidence that my background as an illustrator would somehow smooth the way (every drawing you see on this website and my social media comes straight from my own two hands). I thought, How hard can it be to score and break a piece of glass?

Spoiler: very hard.

Stained glass work is a slow, meticulous process. You begin by choosing sheets of coloured glass and then cutting them to size. Scoring glass is not about slicing or pressing hard. It's about finding just the right amount of pressure to create a hairline fracture. Push too hard, and the glass shatters into dust. Too soft, and nothing happens. After scoring, you “break” the glass with a sharp, clean pressure, praying it follows your intended path. Then comes measuring and cutting lead strips that hug the edges of each piece of glass. These have to fit like puzzle pieces. No winging it. Finally, you brush cement into every gap to hold everything in place and seal it from the elements.

And none of it came naturally to me. Not one step.

There were long stretches where I felt that deep, uncomfortable helplessness, that gap between understanding something in your mind and having your hands fumble through the doing. My early cuts zigzagged wildly. My lead frames bent and collapsed chaotically. I lost count of how many times I cemented my fingers together.

The emotional experience of being a beginner is a full-body ride. Frustration came roaring in fast. I caught myself getting angry over mistakes that, honestly, were bound to happen. Techniques that seemed simple in demonstration became wild and messy the moment I tried them. And yes, there were moments when I questioned whether I belonged there at all.

But tucked inside that messy, uncomfortable space was something else: a spark of something truer and more powerful.

When you stretch your body, you meet resistance, and it is not pleasant. But you trust it. You know it is the beginning of growth. The same thing happens when you stretch your mind and skills. Being a beginner again cracks you wide open to the hard, holy work of learning. It rebuilds empathy. It reminds you how vulnerable real courage is. It wakes up your curiosity in a way nothing else can.

I noticed that every time I wanted to give up was exactly when a breakthrough was waiting for me. A cleaner cut of glass. A frame that fitted snugly. A cement finish that held. Those wins, tiny as they were, tasted sweeter because of the hard, messy road to get there.

So here is what I want to share with anyone learning something new: whether it is art, a new movement practice, a language, whatever it is, let yourself be bad at it. Let yourself make crooked lines and clumsy mistakes. Celebrate the small progress. Ask the questions you are scared will sound silly. Laugh loud and often. You would never shame a beginner who came to you for help, so why shame yourself?

At the end of the workshop, I carried home a crooked, colourful window made with my own hands. It is not perfect. It is not even close. But it is a marker of my willingness to stand at the bottom, to learn, and to keep trying.

And maybe, just maybe, that is the greatest stretch of all.

Yours in flexibility,

Dan