Does it Make Sense to Catalogue Unfinished Projects?

Does It Make Sense to Catalogue Unfinished Projects?

“When a person encounters another and does not use them for any purpose, they stand in relation.” — Martin Buber

Creative Liberation/Paradigm Shift

A premise with which to consider the question:

Borrowing from Buber, I make a distinction between “you” and “thou,” and consider “thou” to be the sacred other — whether referring to a partner, a friend, to the clerk behind the coffee bar, to oneself, or for these purposes, to our work.

And so, I consider the idea — When a person encounters their work, and does not use it for any purpose, they stand in relation to their work.

Buber assigned the word, thou, to that other, and I am using it here to help us to shift the paradigm. To “thou,” we honor the relationship.  I honor my relationship to myself — my values.  I honor my relationship with my work. I honor the work, not as something with which to transact, but as something with which to relate.

When looking at our unfinished projects in the second half of life, we are doing so with earned selectivity.  We are in an era of life where we’ve learned, through experience across all areas of life, that only the true yesses are worthy of our energy.  We are clear on what we value. 

In honoring our work from this stance, we benefit from dispensing with Western productivity systems and ethics that assign product as the highest value.  Only then can we approach the unfinished with the honor and integrity befitting what we have fully established by now — truth to our own values.

And if our work is thou, we have asked, to some extent as it developed, “What do you want to be?”  Can’t we apply the same question to the unfinished nature of our work?  Mightn’t we ask it, “What unfinished form do you want to take? What attitude toward the unfinished ought I assign to thou?”

The limitations of Western productivity ethics — those ethics upon which popularized productivity systems have driven us in the Western world toward output — have denied the living integrity of the unfinished.  Those Western ethics threaten the artistic process.

When our work is thou, its sacred nature relates to time organically, relates to process, relates to our delighting in the unfolding of process — not to regulating it for output — and thereby “success” is redefined. Whereas Western ethics drive the question, “When will you be done?” — we must ask a different, more honoring question regarding our work, and that is, “Am I remaining in meaningful, generative relationship with what matters as it unfolds?”  This redefines success on new, truer terms.

Many of us have come from careers, or supported the endeavors of our children, operating within a framework that moralized labor, met deadlines, measured units, and scaled output for efficiency.  If we worked for others, our increasing productivity — meeting deadlines or quotas — was rewarded.  All of this needs to be reconsidered.  We can reframe our true work with a word that implies the sacred nature of that work and our relationship to it — thou.

When I first asked myself this question — “Does it make sense to catalogue unfinished projects?” — I applied Western ethics.  I was hurried.  I was looking at the projects for the purposes of moving on to the next new work.  I had an attitude of “dealing with them.” I was still operating in the transactional mindset that managing a life in capitalism had trained me to practice. 

And so, I set out to complete the work that still mattered and to discard the work that didn’t.  I set out to light a fire under myself.  I made a Gantt chart listing every project that had gone by the wayside while I was raising my five children or working to make a living.  Among those, I found one project that had been pending for over 10,000 days.  This induced shame — a favorite Western ethical flavor.  I did not honor that shame with my attention.

Instead, I began to explore various ways to leave things unfinished with integrity.  I began to explore non-Western ideas about process, and most importantly, I began to consult my real beliefs about the value of these unfinished works.  Ultimately, from that mindset of loving the unfinished work in its unfinished state — of inquiring of the work, “Why are you unfinished?” or “What kind of finished do you want to be?” — my relationship with the work deepened. 

Whereas I started this journey with a mindset of checking boxes, I soon began living in this question, and I was delivered to a richer relationship with my own projects.  And this relationship gave me answers that dropped me deeper into my own artistic sensibility.

I encountered ideas — beautiful ideas in philosophy, spirituality, art, psychology, and ethics — and cultural variations beyond our own that treat the unfinished as an essential aspect of the human condition.  In doing so — in researching these ideas, in seeing the myriad ways in which works existed unfinished in wholeness — my work expanded into a vast world where the unfinished is a creative act.

I entered that world.

I studied it more deeply and next encountered various treatments of the unfinished — ways of holding the unfinished with honor and integrity: containers—physical, metaphysical, metaphorical; translations into new forms; practices of ritual architecture. I encountered bodies of work that are complete as collections of fragments, the unfinished as an aesthetic, works that are intentionally boundless, and treatments of the unfinished that honor the impermanence of life, such as erasure or erosion.

In my case, I slowed.  I sat with each dusty unfinished project as though I was greeting an old friend — one I sometimes hadn’t seen in years.  And I asked, “What is the most fitting expression of your unfinished state?”

And so, yes, it does make sense to catalogue your unfinished projects — even if, no, especially if, they have sat around unfinished for years.  Because, in doing so, the mature manner in which we have learned to relate to all that is sacred to us, the life lessons we’ve mastered about valuing the “thous” in life, will bring our relationship with these unfinished projects into greatest integrity, into deepest connection with both our unique sensibilities and our work as a living body.