Advance the ending

“Great, I found an image for my blog post!” [crosses item off of to-do list] (Miami University Libraries)

A friend of a friend has four-year-old twins.

Like many small children these days, they are very into their shows. But the family rule is that when the show is over, it’s time for what’s next, be it bath time or bedtime.

The children are still too young to introduce subterfuge to this process, but their mother is not. When it’s getting late and the kids aren’t looking, she sneakily scrubs forward in whatever program they’re watching to shorten the show. A couple of minutes later, she can say, “Oh, look at that! It’s time to go brush our teeth!”

And this, my friends, is what we need to do sometimes to build momentum in our work. At least, it’s what I need to do, especially when I’m struggling to get started. I can write a blog post that’s 100 words long. I can go for a walk around the block on a very windy day instead of suffering through an hour. I can make cereal for breakfast instead of eggs and vegetables and avocado toast. I can shove everything that’s not in its proper place into a box which is then placed in a closet and call it good. I can deliver the shortest inspirational speech ever:

I can adjust my expectations of myself and advance the ending so that I can call it done. And sheepish though I may feel, that’s far better than guilt and shame over leaving things undone or, even worse, confronting a project so big that I can’t even get started.

When I teach songwriting, one of my favorite exercises is to guide students through the writing of a four-line song. The song is allowed to be extremely bad — usually, the lyrics consist of a string of non sequiturs — but it is soon complete. What is a song but a combination of words, melody, and harmony? When we realize that it is that simple, we can do it — and then, most importantly, we can do it again. No one feels like a songwriter when they have a pile of half-finished ideas, but getting one done creates a shift in identity that empowers us to keep going.

There are an awful lot of people out there these days who proudly assert that they are published authors. When you dig deeper, you realize that they have self-published a series of e-books consisting of 50 to 100 pages. I could certainly scoff at that, but who am I to say how long a book needs to be? Not only am I not the arbiter of such things, I haven’t published any, myself. However, that’s a gauntlet I could actually pick up. I could easily write a 75-page book, especially if it had a lot of pictures. And once I’ve done one, I could do another — perhaps a bit longer. I’d be an author.

I was weary from spending over a week knitting most of a sweater that turned out to be the completely wrong size, so I made a shawl that took three days. I wanted an empty email inbox, so I snoozed a handful of emails that I can respond to later, magically removing them from my sight with the click of a button. I wanted some holiday greenery in my home, so I bought a wreath — the kind you are supposed to decorate — and hung it up without decorating it. Voilà. It smells good.

There are so many ways to advance the ending of what you’re working on so that you can call it “done” more quickly. Is it cheating? Maybe. But if it works — if it gets you out of your funk and into a place of possibility and confidence — I would say that is fair play.

Okay, that’s it — this article is over. See you next week!

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