DAY THIRTY FIVE

Must say that the last few days it's been an effort to remember that I had these daily posts to write. Up until then it was the thing at the top of my mind, but now it is starting to disappear from consciousness; it's changing from a pleasurable routine which I looked forward to, to one which if left to it's own devices will become a bit of a conscience-nagger. 

A shorter way of putting it is that the initial burst of enthusiasm, a whim really, with which I started this thing and which carried me further than I thought it might has started to wane. 

This is a familiar problem with me when it comes to any kind of project or interest. It isn't so much that I lose enthusiasm or get taken up with a new idea, more that I can quite literally forget about the entire thing. It's a neurological problem, I've come to suspect. It's as if I can only hold awareness of something for so long and then it's gone in a puff of smoke. It can happen at any time and it doesn't seem to matter whether something is going well or not, whether it's enjoyable or not, it just happens.

As you may imagine this has resulted in many projects being left undone, simply left lying around, sometimes for years, for me to pick up again at some indeterminate point in the future. Many of these projects do get finished eventually, but the reason for starting them may well be long forgotten. It also means, because this doesn't just occur in arts and crafts projects but in general, that I can often appear to be ruminating over the same things for months and years on end. 

There is in one of those 'personality' tests - they test no such thing - which were once much beloved and perhaps still are by management consultants and HR specialists, a label called 'starter-finisher'. It is in the Belbin Team Role Inventory.

This defines a person, as, well, what it says - someone who is motivated by starting and finishing whatever the assignment in hand happens to be. They are keen to start a thing, and once started, can become agitated if it is left undone; they don't like loose ends, and are not very keen on ambiguity, still less the 'chaos' which may be involved in the creative process. They would prefer others deal with that, and when the decisions are sorted and the path known, they be allowed to get on with it. Within a team situation, especially a team of creatives, they may be a very handy person to have on board.

It is fairly clear that I am a starter-non-finisher and that my thinking is anything but linear. This has been the cause of much frustration and heartache down the years, (and not just for me), but I have had to come to accept it. No amount of willpower, discipline, inspirational quotes, how-to or self-help reading has ever made the slightest difference*.

At this point I know some of you may be thinking that not finishing has something to do with perfectionist tendencies, or as I wrote about an artist friend of mine who is never able to submit her work to public gaze, something to do with lack of confidence or a pyschological inability to risk, to let go, and hence to lose control of the work or the situation. I might grant you just a little of that last one - losing control of the situation - but otherwise as I say, it's a neurological thing, the way I'm made. 
 
I will write soon, possibly tomorrow, on the idea of Finished Not Perfect, but I'll finish for now by saying that the most useful thing I ever did about my difficulty was learning to accept it rather than fight or worry about it.
 
Onwards...divergently.
 
 
* You'll notice the strapline under the title of this blog, and I hope I manage to steer clear of anything too platitidinous.
 
 
Picture credit: Whoisjohngalt, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
 
 




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