40. Unfinished
Photo Courtesy of Kai-Rey Lee
Can anything ever be unfinished? Or are things as complete as they are meant to be in the moment?
For months, I’ve been starting things that I haven’t yet finished:
Seth Godin’s Marketing Seminar
Several books, the latest of which is Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Three of Lindsay Mack’s online Tarot courses
Various blog posts and writing projects
My ego wants to invite me into guilt. If I leave something unfinished, then I must lack “grit”. And if I lack “grit”, then popular dialogue suggests I’m somewhere between mediocre and doomed. After all, Angela Duckworth says:
…that grit—a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal—is the hallmark of high achievers in every domain.
Incompletion is incompatible with our achievement-driven society. Page numbers, progress trackers, and quantifiable outputs tend to reinforce this effect.
But maybe you and I don’t aspire to Duckworth’s definition of success. As David Denby writes in this New Yorker article on the limits to “grit”:
Tautology haunts the shape of these fervent lessons. “Grittier spellers practiced more than less gritty spellers,” Duckworth assures us. Well, yes. She is looking for winners, and winners of a certain sort: survivors in highly competitive activities in which a single physical, mental, or technical skill can be cultivated through relentless practice….In many careers, you can grind away for years and get nowhere if you aren’t adaptable, creative, alert….Duckworth—indifferent to class, race, history, society, culture—strips success of its human reality, and her single-minded theory may explain very little.
As important as “grit” may be, it’s not everything. And it comes at a cost. Rather than force myself to doggedly plow through, I’ve been trying something new: honoring the rhythms of my body, my spirit, my desire.
If I don’t feel compelled to continue with something, I’m allowed to stop. Again, I give myself permission to stop.
Perhaps I’ll circle back later on. Perhaps I won’t. But I was meant to engage for the time that I did, as it led me to the next step on my path. For instance, the first few Marketing Seminar lessons inspired me to start writing this blog—a next step that has been incredibly fruitful regardless of my subsequent disinterest in the remaining course material.
And who knows? An unfinished project might be a gift to your future self.
Though my ego wants to disagree, stopping isn’t quitting or leaving something unfinished or lacking “grit”. Stopping is actively choosing what is aligned with my highest good in each moment. To stop is to trust the timing of life.
What does it even mean to finish something? There’s a reason why “it’s about the journey not the destination” is a saying. If you’re fully awake and deeply alive, there is no end.