You could call it a project if you want
I remember the first few times I spoke to J in 2018 was when I first encountered someone talking about projects in their personal life.
What is a project? Off the top of my head, a project is one that
- Involves an intention or objective
- Has a clear start
- And possibly a clear end (although this could be quite fuzzy)
- Has a set of parameters and scope
- Involves a set of tasks that are intended to help one work towards the objectives and goals
- Can be undertaken alone or with others
I often find self-directed projects inspiring, possibly because of my inability to start or inability to follow through. darn, I don't know which one is worst. A zine could be a project. Working on a website could be a project. A garden could be a project. A bouldering problem at the gym is a project. Maintaining a homestead/seastead could be one too; 100r and the projects that embark on while sailing Pino has inspired me very much. You could also view life as a series of projects, or life itself as one big project. I'm not wedded to what can or cannot be called a project and we can clearly have quite different definitions.
I've realized that the act of declaring an endeavour a project, even if in private, creates a kind of momentum for an undertaking, calls into being a container for material development, inspiration cultivation. For me, from the point of declaration, I find that the impulses and tendencies develop in two ways: one, it becomes more official, I take my own longings and curiosities more seriously, and two, paradoxically, the creation of a container for myself makes room for conscious experimentation too such that the commitment is also held in the lightness of experimentation. All this I find utterly fascinating :D
I've always thought about how nice it is to have the motivation, or rather, to believe in something enough to work on it over time, to see it through. I think it is important to see it as a practice, a discipline, an avenue for applying oneself. Interests change, and moods, too, of course. But an important lesson I learnt recently is to never believe in moods. It is one thing to be swayed by moods, to allow it to lead you to a hollow place of questioning where nothing seems eventually worth doing, and another to recognize when something is no longer deeply aligned with what you want to put out into the world. Where is the line, you may ask? That is something we each have to discern for ourselves. Occasionally we may pay the price of learning, but over time, we get better at telling.
Hoping to share more about my intentions and projects for the coming months, soon.
I'm stirring the cauldron and simmering some things over here in my stonesoup shack. Foraging in the wild and adding the occasional morsel into the pot. A watched pot never boils, they say, and so I try to putter around and not watch the pot too much. I let time and heat do its thing. If you are simmering something too and want to share, I'd like to hear about it (: