Ruining a good thing

A ripple says, “I was there.” (Image by strikers)

The last day of school was always sometime in June — June 16, maybe, or June 21 if there had been a lot of snow days — and that was it. It’s finally warm outside, there are finally leaves on the trees, and you’re finally free. A perfect transition from one grade to the next, with a nearly three-month buffer between the two.

The feeling of absolute freedom has stayed with me. No obligations, no dangling threads. As an educator, I follow the rhythms of the school year, but I no longer get to experience a clean break in which all of my projects end at the same time. Three-month vacations are a thing of the past as well, sorry to say.

I do still get to have a fresh, pristine start to new things. And that can be a challenge. The snow looks so pretty when it first falls, and then it gets muddy and gross as people walk through it and drive through it, living their lives. I never want my lovely vision to turn into that grimy snow, so I struggle to release it into the world.

However, in order to get things done, I have to accept messiness and imperfection. I have to step forward and put my footprints out there. And for an ambitious project to become a reality, it needs the input of multiple people. No matter what, my initial vision will become distorted. This isn’t necessarily a problem: Magic can happen. On the other hand, things can go totally off the rails without daily attention and effort to keep things on track. It may be awhile before there’s anything resembling a graduation celebration.

In such a situation, have to learn not to be the bottleneck, even on a project I’m doing by myself. I can get stuck on a tiny decision and slow the whole thing down. I might even be tempted to abandon the project because it’s not close enough to what I imagined at the beginning. With the help of others, whether they’re coworkers or advisors, I can push through pain of things not turning out as I had hoped. Together, we can make adjustments or improvements — or accept that certain elements might turn out to be beyond our control.

I still have ideas that have been brewing for the better part of a decade, not quite trusting that I’ve got hospitable soil to plant them in. Now that I have some practice and help with this process of cultivating ideas, this is starting to seem absurd. Why would an untested idea be better than a tested one? Thanks to the help of an amazing team and clever mentors, it’s making more sense to sow these seeds and see what they sprout into.

The irony is that, with so many ongoing projects, I forget that some of these ideas represent projects that can be fully completed. They have a beginning, middle, and end. If I see them through, they will be placed in the “done” pile, just as I once finished third grade, fourth grade, and fifth grade in the glow of early summer. And when something is completed, I’ve got some space to start a new project. What’s more, I can use what I’ve learned to make the next one better. It’s hard to let the old project go, but there will always be a new one to take its place.

There’s something beautiful about the tabula rasa. But there’s also beauty to be found in the messy act of creation. We can ruin a good thing to turn it into something great.