The drive to be productive runs strong and deep in me, but never more than when I was pregnant. Pictured with this post is a cross-stitch project I began when I was expecting my oldest son. It was ambitious (foolhardy?) to think I could finish this in the mere 36 weeks I carried him, but my need to nest and put my personal stamp on his nursery was so intense I began it anyway. Like so many other passions, my time spent cross-stitching was soon replaced with the more practical tasks of parenting and this bit of unfinished business got tucked away for “later.”
It’s now 22 years later. Long gone is the castle-themed nursery where this finished piece was going to hang. My 20/20 vision and patience for working with such tiny holes are also things of the past, but I still let this project take up precious space in my closet. For whatever reason, I’m not ready to admit I will never work on this again.
I’m starting to think the first half of life is all about starting things – projects, relationships, careers, collections of all kinds – and the second half of life is spent discerning what’s worth keeping. At 55, I am awash in unfinished business – remnants much larger than what’s in my craft closet. Careers I must accept I will never return to. Ideas of what my life would/should be like that are becoming less and less likely. People who were the center of my world one day, then gone the next. Maybe that’s why the more tangible unfinished business bothers me so much? It’s within my control (as opposed to the rest of this), so why don’t I control it?
It used to be a goal of mine to spend a year finishing all the creative projects I’d started and left unfinished. But what if the peace of mind I’m seeking could come from simply letting them go? What if I could resist the inevitable feelings of shame and failure, and instead feel gratitude for whatever these projects gave me – experience? distraction? release?
I will probably always prefer to see things through or at least have the chance for closure, but when those are not options, I must remember the gift of unfinished business, which I’m choosing to see as placeholders, life lessons, and time well spent until whatever is next comes along.
II resonate with this post, as I am at the point of releasing “things I planned to get done, books I intended to write, projects to finish.” I’ll be 70 in November. I feel as though I am running out of time to do “everything” and need to focus better.
One thought for you: I started a wedding quilt for Greg a year before our wedding, which means nearly 44 years ago now. It is a Cathedral Window and takes forever to make. I never finished it, not even close. It hangs high on a wall in our living room, the strip I finished. But even in that, there is a row of white were the colors never got stitched in. Greg says, “It is appropriate that a cathedral window quilt be unfinished. In Medieval times, the great cathedrals had parts that were purposely left unfinished, as we, too, are unfinished works in the world. I may not be remembering this exactly, but close.
So consider your unfinished works to be works of art; unfinished but not unloved; planned with love but put aside for living. And yes, let go when it feels right. I am in the midst of doing that, and it really makes me focus on what is important in life, in this time of living.
Bless you in this journey, dear friend.
I love the thought that we, too, are unfinished works in the world. There’s a whole blog post in that! Thank you, again, for walking with me.
As soon as it arrives from Scotland, I’m sending you something along the lines of this post.