Keeping Up with Oneself

I am naturally inclined to having a “big picture” mentality—witness this blog.  I seem to have countless projects running in my head, countless more untethered ideas, vignettes of possibilities that bubble up in my awareness which I often scramble to write down before they pop into extinction, leaving a filmy trace of their promise.

Over time I have come to feel like I am not simply pursuing my dreams, but am racing breathlessly after them as they recede.  I’ve accomplished much, but so much more I only imagine I complete.

I had a friend when I was in my twenties who wanted to be an artist, a sculptor.  He spent some of his artistic energy collecting barrels of objects he imagined he’d one day make into works of art.  The rest of his time he spent planning, specifically drafting plans, like an architect designing structures.  These two efforts left virtually no time for building things, and when he’d occasionally attempt to do so he was at once dissatisfied with the result and taken aback by the amount of time making things actually required.  He decided, quite courageously I felt at the time, to stop attempting to make art.  He got rid of his barrels of stuff and just drew his plans for all the pieces he’d never complete, arguably never begin.

Our society emphasizes results and winning competitions, over process and thought.  We need things done, of course, but we need to improve how we do them and, more importantly, more fully consider what we’re doing in the first place and at milestones along the way.  A good software developer knows that time spent in analysis reduces time spent in coding and testing.  But we’re pushed to meet deadlines and have become inured to continually returning to the drawing board to come up with the next best thing, to produce new versions of everything from the latest couture to the latest weaponry.

But I digress, as I so often do when related ideas burst in my brain.  My point, my original point, was not to lament how our society stresses us to achieve, but to consider my friend the (former?) artist and his solution to his dilemma, and how I find myself barely able to keep up with my own plans, especially those plans which I have not yet given up on completing.

So, considering my own dilemma, here are a few thoughts for now:

I am losing the race to finish the things I’ve started.  I am old enough to have physical file folders the contents of which are yellow with age, and which I examine as if they were gathered, written, composed by some ancestor of mine, not myself. 

Instead of a “bucket list”—I have that in spades—I have a list of projects I know I will never complete.  In the manner of my friend, I’m calling them done before they’re even fully developed.  I have made peace with myself that I can’t do everything I propose to do.

I am considering exit strategies, ways to respect my ideas, my accomplishments, my failures, my best intentions, so that the chaos of my attempts at living well has more form to it—a theme, perhaps.  Some of my impulse here is leaving a legacy, I’m sure.  But more immediately, I need a better coping mechanism than chasing after illusions.  I need to more realistically manage my expectations, and this means continuing to improve on how I get things done, when I can expect to complete projects, and whether I want to follow some paths at all or not.

Maybe in simply writing this I’ve solved my dilemma, solving it by identifying it as a meta-project, a project of projects, and admitting to myself that catching up with myself is a task I’ll never complete.