Special Interest Groups

Last evening I received a phone call asking if I could give someone a ride to the quilter's guild meeting tonight.  I was tired and cranky and forced to make a decision quickly, so said I wasn't going to go.  Over the past 3-4 years I've slowly withdrawn from the embroiderers' guild and actually resigned my membeship last fall, so I now see this decision about the quilters as, perhaps, the thin end of the wedge leading to total withdrawl.  I have intentionally given up my other volunteer work for the next year.

So I ask, what role do organizations such as this play in our lives?  I have been very active in both groups, spending over 20 years on the executive of the embroiderers' guild and over 10years on the executive of the quilters' guild.  I made a good contibution to both, but also received value for my effort.  At a time in my life when I was a wife, harried, mother, and full time employee in a stressful job, they provided much needed stress relief.  I told my children, who expressed resentment at the four evenings a month I went out, that those four evenings kept me from committing murder.  ( Thank Goodness they were old enough to get the joke)  I learned so many new things, resulting in an excellent grounding the the basic techniques and traditions of both fields. Good enough that I have been teaching both for over 35 years.

Now I have taken that knowledge and am applying it to my art work.  I am using every techniques I have learned in both, plus more, and using all of it,  in creating what can only be called fibre collages.  My stimulation and knowledge development is now coming from wider sources.  The special interest groups I belong to are more regional or national, and/or much more focussed. 

So what is left to gain from the local, traditionally-based, special interest groups?  Fellowship for sure, but my interests are no longer the interests of the majority of these group members.  Certainly I have grown, intellectually, but as I age, I also find my sphere of interest getting smaller.  I worry that if I continue to drift away from some of these organizations, I will end up a lonely old woman working in my studio ( or maybe playing internet poker--Heaven forbid) with little human contact and only a tenuous hold on reality.  This is scarey!

So, while I may still slowly leave the traditional local special interest groups, I think I better do so using a long term plan that will maintain my vision of myself as a social animal.