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November 21, 2005

WE START TO FINISH

I had an incredibly inspiring day yesterday. Not inspiring in the usual sense where I usually trot off feeling my little brain bubbling with new ideas, but inspiring in the sense of I now have a real kick in the pants to finish the last crop of bubble-brain ideas.

The lovely and charming Michelle came over to visit, and we sat at the kitchen table and drank chocolate coffee and ate bagels with pumpkin cream cheese (cuz I am all like Martha Stewart and shit) and spread out some of our unfinished projects and took a good hard look at them.

Out of respect for the table, we did not put all of our works-in-progress on it, or the poor thing's little legs would have buckled like a shoe and collapsed and quite likely sent the whole mess crashing down through the kitchen floor into the basement. We just chose some of our brilliant ideas.

And then we talked about why we hadn't finished them. We had some really good reasons, too. In many cases, I think we had put as much energy into creating really clever and plausible-sounding excuses for not finishing as we had into the brilliant ideas themselves.

"Well, I would have finished, but then I decided to change the name of the "company" (that mind you, doesn't exist yet) and I'm not sure if I really like the name or not, so I thought I'd wait to do, you know, final-final-finals until I decide if I'm going to keep the new dog or not, cause otherwise it wouldn't make sense."

or

"I was going to do this, and so I did all these sketches and spent hours creating this beautiful little mock-up of my book that shows how wonderful it's going to be when it's finished and then I thought maybe I shouldn't use colored pencil, maybe I should use paint, and maybe instead of a book it should be some paintings and now it's sort of turned into two projects and I'm not sure which one to do first."

What these basically translate as, we decided, is:

"I have worked on this to the point where I am starting to be able to see its potential and I think it's maybe actually pretty good, and I am stone cold terrified to finish it and put it out there and risk rejection, or even worse, SUCCESS, so I am going to hem and haw and pick at details and distract myself so that I don't actually have to finish it and find out that maybe my deep down fears are right and other people are going to think my work is poo."

Or something to that effect. I don't think poo was ever actually mentioned out loud, but it was implied.

I have this habit with projects. I get an idea, and I get all excited about it, and I get about 7/10ths of the way through it, and then I rechannel my creative urges into finding excuses not to finish. Like, maybe the style isn't right, or maybe I should make it bigger or smaller or there's some little widget I need to finish it but it's only available in the K-Mart in Kalamazoo at midnight on the night of the winter solstice. When it comes to self-sabotage, I am a ninja. I can sneak into my own head, quietly kill an idea and sneak out without ever knowing I was there.

After we raked over our ideas, we each picked one that we want to focus on right now. We told all the other ideas that we loved them, patted their little heads and told them we'd come back to play with them later. And then we made a list of the next couple of steps we needed to take in developing the idea that we'd chosen. And then we made a date to meet again in about three weeks and bring the ideas along and see what progress we've made. There's nothing like a little accountability to give you some inspiration.

In the spirit of not having my life all full of plans and half-baked ideas and partially finished projects, I've decided that every day this week, I am going to finish something I've started. Things that I have bought the materials for and never quite gotten around to completing. Up to and including Thanksgiving, when I am actually going to make Susan Stamberg's mother-in-law's cranberry relish instead of just my annual tradition of printing out the recipe and then deciding at the last minute to make it on Christmas instead and then losing the recipe in the meantime and finding it again stuffed into a drawer in the linen cabinet sometime in mid-April. So help me, this year we're going to have it. Jason will probably have to suck it through a straw, but we're having it.

Today I am going to finish the wind chime that I started last July, and I will post a picture of it tomorrow.

And in the meantime, in the spirit of all those plaques and cards and buttons and magnets that have messages like "Begin!" and "Follow Your Dreams!" and "Start Today!" that if you're anything like me, you have peppered all over your house, I have made this:

Posted by tammy at November 21, 2005 09:33 AM

Comments

Posted by: Heather at November 24, 2005 02:36 AM

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