Unfinished

Yesterday I found the nubby blue almost-scarf that I started knitting in March 2007. Last month’s selection for book club sits on my nightstand, a bookmark sticking out somewhere near the middle. Half of a poem, scribbled on the back of an obsolete to-do list, fell out of my purse over the weekend. It will slip out again in a few weeks and nudge me to close the loop on the musings that prompted me to jot it down in the first place—I probably won’t.

I’m OK with unfinished. That sounds blasphemous as I say it, seditious somehow. My Puritan ancestors with their much-touted work ethic must spin in their graves at my confession. Thanks to them, we live in a culture consumed by a model of success that focuses almost exclusively on end results. Unfinished things represent sloth or weakness or failure. “Produce,” our forebears whisper from the dust. So we do, without examining the product.

The mentality reminds me of the Play-Doh Fun Factory that held my interest for about fifteen minutes on Christmas morning the year that I begged Santa for it. I crammed the Factory full of the artificially-colored substance provided and pushed the handle as hard as I could. Voila! A uniform and utterly useless rope of Play-Doh extruded reluctantly from the other end. Period. That was it—a finished product that was neither meaningful nor beautiful. Sound familiar? How often do we cram our days full of whatever society tells us matters and squeeze as hard as we can, strangling the life out of life, determined to finish what we start? Is it any wonder when the outcomes are neither meaningful nor beautiful to us?

“Life is too short. You can’t do it all.” my parents often told me. As a teenager I knew better, naturally. “Hah!” I secretly thought. “Maybe you can’t do it all. Watch and learn, folks.” It took a few melt-downs and miseries before I would acknowledge that every book was not worth finishing and that all deep thoughts did not require the symmetry of verse. I realized that I can’t do it all. Now, I don’t even want to.

I will never finish knitting that blue scarf, but I’m not ready to throw it away either. It reminds me, like a snapshot, of Joan. She sat in her hospital bed with me beside her and patiently taught me to cast on and knit and purl. The business of guiding my awkward hands distracted her from pain and the fear of dying. My knitting was never about the scarf, not even a little bit. Joan talked as we worked the yarn—talked about things she loved. We laughed together and we wept openly. Eventually Joan came to peace. For a month the scarf took shape, but it never mattered. The process mattered.

Process matters to me. I exist to become, not merely to produce. Choosing what to begin is no small trick. Recognizing what is worth finishing is even more difficult. When I find myself pushing hard toward an outcome that holds nothing for my spirit, I allow myself to lay it down. In the end I suspect that the things we have abandoned along the path will explain much of what we have become. I’m OK with unfinished. Just consider me a work in progress.

-Jerie
*photo credit

Originally posted on The Peanut Gallery Speaks
 http://www.peanutgalleryspeaks.com/2010/10/unfinished/

Moving Mountains

They say with a little faith you can move mountains.  Most people will probably never attempt to levitate an actual geological formation by the Biblical method.  (Although, I have often wished that I could somehow make Nevada pick itself up and settle elsewhere.  Anywhere.  Just not between me and my kids/grandkids. A Nevada-free American West would cut the drive to my babies in half. And get rid of Las Vegas to boot. Now there's a win-win.) Last week I moved mountains of a different kind--in my pajamas, no less.

After two full weeks of vacation we came home to--mountains. Mountains of mail. Mountains of laundry. Mountains of newspapers. Mountains of green fuzzy food lurking in the back of the fridge. Mountains that required moving. By hand. My hand, specifically. I keep thinking of Mary Poppins--you know, how she makes the entire mess in the nursery clean itself up. With perky music. She doesn't even have to use a wand or wiggle her nose. Either the woman has some phenomenal faith going for her, or she's just really scary.

Apparently my faith hasn't reached the "mustard seed" level yet, because the mountains of laundry downstairs don't budge in spite of my wish that they would wash themselves and put themselves away (neatly folded, of course.) On the contrary, it seems that the piles expand when I'm not looking.  If my clothes are being fruitful and multiplying, as it would appear, then why can never find anything to wear? I did eventually triumph over the dirty and the rumpled, the stained and the smelly. Having dispatched veritable mountain ranges of laundry in the past ten days I feel qualified to offer a few tips:

1) If you have to apply your entire body weight against the door of your front-load washing machine in order to close it, you have filled it too full. Remedy? Turn around, backside to door, and bump it with your bootie to make it latch. That's right, girl, show it who's boss.

2) The above mentioned load will take approximately 17 hours to dry in your little domestic grade dryer, and you need that shirt for work today. Solution? Keep pushing the start button until a quarter of an hour before you need to leave the house. Remove said shirt. Lay it over towel rack in bathroom and bust out hair dryer. Blast for ten minutes on high. If your hair is also wet, lean over and kill two birds with one stone.

3) Woops! Your blouse looks a little wrinkled when the load is dry. Iron? Not in this life. That's what a dryer is for, my friend. Return blouse to empty dryer with a damp dish towel and push start. Remove blouse promptly, wear immediately.

4)Your California King sheets are twice as long as your ironing board. WHAT ARE YOU IRONING SHEETS FOR? Life is too short. No one will ever see them--they're under the comforter. Besides, you're asleep, right?  See #3 above.

5) The total mass of the dirty clothes on the floor of your laundry room diminishes at the exact rate that the pile of clean laundry on your guest room bed grows. As the proportion of clean laundry increases you can dig through the mounting pile every morning for clean socks or you can break down and fold. If you take the brave course and fold, listen to Giants baseball--it's the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

Mary Poppins has got nothing on me.