Challenges and Chastising

I have now had one 20oz dark roast coffee with two shots of espresso in it and one 12oz Americano... I'm trying to use caffiene to scrub from my mind that I was chastised about my knitting at 8am this morning. Okay, well it's not as bad as it sounds, and to be honest, it did give me a thought provoking moment, but at the very second that the words were flung, I sort of wanted to lunge out of my chair and attack the offender...

So in the last two months... well since March 25 till now, which is a month and a half, I have finished two WIPS and started and finished two more shawls.... I now have a stack of shawls and scarves to pick from each day. Which I think is just awesome! And I have enough yarn to make a million more, but I got to thinking... even tho it's an enjoyable thing to churn out shawls, am I not ready to learn something new? Or try something harder? The problem for me is that I subscribe to the philosophy that if the pattern is well written, I can make it. Not clothes, because I'm not mentally ready to make clothes, but any lace shawl/blanket/stole is just a combination of two stitches and some placement of yarn, so it's not as tho any pattern feels out of my reach. Anyway, the chastising was along those lines. Someone from my office remarked that I am now speeding along with my knitting and perhaps I wasn't doing anything particularly difficult if I could start and finish items so quickly. That perhaps I should knit a lace tablecloth... I mentioned that I have no desire to knit a table cloth because you need to knit it with cotton or linen and I don't like knitting with them because they're not stretchy and the remark of note was 'I guess you're just not willing to challenge yourself'.
I did think about that.... the last thing I made was a garter stitch shawl with a knitted lace border. It's amazing and quite large, but it realistically only took me about 10 days of actually working on it to be done... Purling really slows me down, but I don't find it difficult, so it's not like stockinette is a challenge... I've been easing more purling into my knitting projects... there are whole chunks of stockinette on my WM shawl and I made two Feather and Fan patterns that involve purling, so it's not like I never do it...
So I continued to think about what would be a challenge for me... how could I challenge myself in my craft. And the answer was already sort of decided for me/by me last week when I decided to finish everything on the needles before starting new projects. That means I have to finish my WM shawl with the purling and the ridiculously twisty yarn, the 7' bulky weight lace blanket that will soon have 640 stitches around, the crochet on my round shawl, the silk scarf for my sister and the beaded lace shawl I started in June last year. I made a deal with myself that I wouldn't start new projects or buy more yarn until these were done. Now, to be fair, the blankie won't be done until around July or August, so that one, so long as I'm working on it diligently can be a WIP ongoing, but the rest of this stuff is getting done! It annoys me that I can finish a 6' wide triangular shawl in 10 days but I've let the beaded lace (with no purling btw) languish for almost a year... that I really wanted to snuggle under my blankie this winter, but it wasn't done...
So my challenge to me is to finish these things that for some reason or another have sat around for some time... some longer than others but none ever having had dedicated attention. That blankie would have been perfect this winter if last year I had set my 2 rounds a day goal. I will grant myself that I am faster and more proficient now than I was then, but even if it had taken me ten times as long, it would have still been done.
This brings me to a bit of an analogy in my life. Every day that I agree to be unhappy (if you're not disagreeing, you're agreeing) with my weight and my health is another day that goes by... nothing happens when you don't make stuff happen, and every day that I didn't knit on my blanket, was a day longer that it wasn't done. and every day that I don't get up and go for a walk is another day that nothing happens... so it stands to reason that I will challenge myself... because if you don't challenge yourself, aren't you just standing still?