The Art of the Possible

From Jane Brocket's lovely book:

If you do feel encouraged to make or bake or grow something, the wonderful thing about the gentle arts is that they are totally manageable and achievable.

There is constant pressure today to have the perfect house/body/children/relationship, and we can only fail because the standards set in the media are so ridiculously unrealistic. But the joy of knitting or stitching or baking or homemaking lies in the fact that there are no rules, there are no levels of perfection that we need to attain. The whole point about the gentle arts is that they are noncompetitive, soothing, and utterly pleasurable. Anyone who tells you otherwise should be tied up with her acrylic yarn and deprived of her knitting needles for a very long time.