The Courage to Be Confused. The Courage to Be Patient.

19melissa68. Creative Commons license.

I’ve never been lost, but I was mighty turned around for three days once.
—Daniel Boone

At the moment I can identify with this rat in the maze…I’m exploring new territory and expanding my mental map of the world of blogging. In the process I’m going through a period of confusion. But like Daniel Boone I’m not lost…I’m just a bit “turned around” for a while.

Why the confusion? I just switched to a MacBook from the PCs I’ve been using for years. I also installed a more recent version of WordPress, which has a different interface from the old one. Neither of those changes are difficult, but it takes some practice to be able to work without having to think of the mechanics.

And if that weren’t enough to keep me amused, I decided to change my blog themes from three columns to two. That means going into the inner workings of my WordPress files and learning something about PHP (a scripting language for building web sites) and becoming more adept at CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). When I developed my sites last year, I took an open source theme and hacked around until my site looked the way I wanted it to. The resulting coding wasn’t very elegant, and I knew someday I would have to spend a lot of time understanding how to do it correctly. That time is now. It’s a big job, but I’m breaking it down into bite-sized pieces and am learning a lot. Being confused in the process is a small price to pay for a bit more mastery. All it takes is the courage to be confused and the courage to be patient.

What about you? Are you trying something new at the moment? How do you feel about it? Please share your experience in the comments section.

Thanks to bikehikebabe for commenting on last week’s post.