Finishing

Z was helping me at the house again today. He made a comment which gave me pause. Which was, “you know, it’s great to be doing all this general preparation work, but we also need to pick a task and drive it towards completion”. He said it really gently but it is a thought other people have expressed, and if you look around my home, my life, you can see that this is a thing which is true of me in many places.

Lots and lots of forward movement. Few specific things being driven through to completion. I should be a little bit more realistic. It’s not that there are no things being driven through to completion. There are lots of things I’ve done. You know, I installed the water underneath the sink, for example. But perhaps there could be many more things that are being driven through to completion. Not tasks started underway, but tasks completed and squared away – just completely done.

I remember a little while ago when I was chatting with a young woman. Not that young, she was my age, but we were talking and she asked for a video tour of the house and as I showed her around, showing someone else the house made me realise how unfinished everything is and how many little projects I had started without really completing them. She noticed, too. And she commented, you know, have you finished anything?

So I think this is a good time to pick some things and try to finish them. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, but it’s great to wrap things up and move things forward rather than letting them just drift along unattended to.

In a way, that’s part of the reason I started doing this writing, because it gave me something that I could start and finish doing every day. Even there, there’s probably some more work to do. The intention is to get a lot of these posts up onto the blog where they are publicly available. I’m not up to date with that, I think my last entry was at the beginning of the month. And there’s many entries which need some editing or some work before they can be considered complete. So I think I’m going to give myself a little bit of time this morning to write some more filler entries and get the blog a bit more caught up. I’ve sorta decided filler entries (where I didn’t write something on the day or on the day after, will all now be fiction. I think that’s a good approach. So if I miss a day, then the only thing I’m going to write in it is a short fiction piece.

The utility room now has the floor tiled. And as a space really needs some more work done, so I think a clear plan there and some deliberate movement towards completion is absolutely the right thing to do.

Absolutely is a very strong word. Even as I said it, I was thinking to myself, perhaps it makes more sense to take a little step back and decide what thing I ought to finish first. One of the things that would make my life a lot more comfortable would be to have a room that I live and work in which is fitted out and decorated to a good standard. And I think that that is an achievable goal. I also think I know which room in the house that is, so maybe that’s really the first thing I should be doing is moving that room towards a fitted out finish.