Hello beautiful human,
Before I get into this morning’s words: Folk who peek behind the paywall, don’t forget this is your last day to vote in this week’s poll, to help me choose what content from the past gets pulled forward into future projects. Podcasts, essays, future compilations…who knows what will come from this gathering and sifting work we do together. (And if you’re reading this and you want to particpate in that ongoing work of co-creation, we’d love to have you! Subscribe below).
What content from the past gets pulled into future projects… the act of looking back and reclaiming, gathering, revisiting material…all this is new for me. Not my usual mode or practice. Interestingly, because this is how energies play out, that new urge that I’m feeling to review and reclaim and reinterpret is not only happening here in An Inviting Space, but maybe starting to play out in larger ways at the same time. My partner is clearing a garage. My kids are sending boxes of clothes to the local thrift store. And I was talking with a friend and colleague yesterday about going back and sifting through projects we did from years back, and maybe finding ways to bring them forward. What would that feel like? What new and fresh perspectives might we bring to a subject or theme now? How would our old goals and objectives seem from here? Is there some possible way to create new from old? (Do we ever do anything else?)
It’s not my usual practice.
I don’t tend to dwell on what I’ve already done. Quite this opposite. I like to move on, find the new, investigate what’s possible next. This morning as the sky lightens, I can admit that behind the energy and practice of incessant curiosity is not only a creative drive and attitude toward the world (which there is) but also, quite possibly, the desire to avoid and run away from shame.
Shame, that a project didn’t get more play at the time. Shame that the audience wasn’t bigger, the book didn’t sell more copies, the essay didn’t have more scope and influence. Somewhere in there is a sense of my failing, again and again and again, and maybe it’s time for me to begin to ask where that comes from.
Of course it’s always been easier and more comfortable for me to turn from all that, and focus on what I’m doing now, and next, where possibilities seem new and exciting. Where is the next chance to succeed? To instead go back and review and reclaim old work and say, This was worthy. This was fun. This was exciting. is also to do the hard work of asking, what does “failure” mean? How do we define it? Who gets to define it?
In any project, I can say I left nothing on the table. And, however worthy, fun or exciting any given project was at the time, where is it now? Did it accomplish what I hoped it would? Did it bring me what I wanted? Can it be okay if the answer to those questions is No?
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