I have written here in the past about my struggle to decide whether I should soldier on with projects started many years ago or whether I should just let them go in favor of starting something new. The answer I always come back to is that I will continue to sporadically work on old projects if something inspires me to do so but I’ll also leave myself plenty of room to start new projects.
I am thinking about this again today after just reading a post on the Gypsy Girl’s Guide blog. The author writers about how she has studied the work of a photographer who captured in images the growth of her cousin and sister over a ten year period. Thinking about this, the author writes:
“In my humble opinion, to build something continuously for ten years is a most admirable task, don’t you think? … Time brings the work a certain maturity and intimacy, that most definitely comes through in the final product.”
I don’t know if this is true for all of my long-term projects but it is certainly true for some of them. I have been able to go back to rework old ideas that started with only a glimmer of true understanding about the topic but have now grown because of more immersion in the topic over time. And I don’t just mean more research … I mean that there are pieces of writing that I started but hadn’t yet had enough life experience to clearly understand the emotions I was trying to convey and more time in life has given me more time to develop both the experience and the ability to articulate the experience that I didn’t have when launching those projects.
Is it the same for you? Do you like projects that drag on over the years or do you like to pick something, finish it and move on?
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