making good creases

It’s already December, and while I haven’t done an awful lot of my own creative work lately, I have already wrapped all of my Christmas gifts. One way I love to decorate gifts is with origami ornaments. It’s a fun way to add a decorative pop of color and a personal touch. This is about the only time of year that I do any origami, and I always think how fun and relaxing it is and that I should do it more often. Once you know the basics, it’s kind of a zen-like hobby. It’s amazing what you can do with nothing more than a single sheet of 6 x 6″ paper.

One important thing about the art of origami is not only making precise folds, but making strong ones. A good fold is one that you’ve creased very hard, and sometimes one that has been folded back and forth several times to make a crease that will go either direction later. Sometimes you’ll need a mountain fold (wrong sides of the paper are together so the crease makes a peak) and sometimes you’ll need a valley fold (right sides of the paper are together so that the crease forms a “V”). Often you’ll have made twenty or thirty folds, then unfold it completely just to make one little fold go a different direction before you continue. Steps 1-30 were just the groundwork for you to be able to go back and make that one little pocket fold in step 31. If you made good folds, getting back to step 31 will be effortless.

There’s a lot of groundwork to origami. 90% of the piece consists of preliminary folds that won’t look anything like the finished product until the very end.

Sometimes a lot of our work can feel insignificant or fruitless. We can feel like we’re doing a lot of work for nothing, or for no audience. But perhaps it’s important to remember that much of what we do is akin to the preliminary folds that build the foundation of the finished product; without which our desired results would not be possible. Everything done with the end in mind helps to wear a groove into your workflow to make the next step in the process that much easier, either this time or next time or the next one hundred times. When you are on step thirty and it feels like you have to undo everything you’ve already done, remember that it made step thirty-one possible, and that you’re on your way toward your end goal. Both mountains and valleys have made the rest of the work possible. It may not look like much even 90% of the way through, but when you achieve what you set out to do, the seemingly meaningless preparatory steps will have been well worth it.

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