Note: I’ve been traveling so this post is coming a few days later than usual. Thanks for your patience!
We all have them—the projects to which we have given our proverbial blood, sweat and tears, the dreams we have placed before ourselves, the goals toward which we have striven. And then…if we have lived long enough, and had a realistic enough human experience, we have all had projects, dreams, goals that haven’t “worked out.” Or at least—that haven’t worked out yet.
I’ve been hanging onto this post for a while, trying to feel my way into it. I have several projects tucked away in the hope chest that is the writing folder on my computer. Projects that have seemingly hit dead ends, work for which the doors have not (yet) opened.
You could fairly say that I’ve even gone through a grieving period for these works, letting myself mourn the simple fact that they did not go where I dreamed they would. In fact, in the original version of this post (which I wrote almost a year ago), I stated that these projects were over, that I was grieving them because I was leaving them behind entirely.
And yet…as time has passed, I have found myself turning back to one of them. I entered it into an application for a grant last week! Perhaps, though I thought that project was done, it has more growing to do. Maybe there’s another way of exploring the ideas held inside it.
Nothing creative is ever truly “dead”—because it goes on living in you. An idea may simmer on the back burner for years before you truly understand it; before you grow into its possibilities. Or something you’ve assumed you completed starts whispering to you again, in new ways. In the tangled wood, a path appears, dappled with moonlight, calling you forward. Tentative, tired, yet ever dreaming and yearning, you follow it.
And if your project is locked firmly in that hope chest, awaiting its destiny, here’s another thought. If devoting my life to creative endeavor has taught me anything, it’s this: something new ALWAYS comes. A door always opens. An opportunity sweeps us off our feet.
Since it might not be the door, the thing, the opportunity, we’ve been spending so much time hoping for, it makes sense to me that a grieving period might be necessary between the close of one opportunity and the opening of another. We are allowed to mourn what has not come to pass. We are allowed to give ourselves that space. To breathe, and to let it all fall away, so that we can open again to the new, when the time is right.
Yet nothing we have done ever dies. Like the reincarnation of souls, stories and ideas and art and beauty can be reborn, too, in the new work that comes from you. Perhaps you will find yourself creating something new that could not have been born without the last piece of work you did. Or maybe you find that in the new work, there are threads of the old one, glimmering through the new creation that’s coming through you, fine filaments that add luster to your new tapestry.
I was talking with a dear friend recently who wondered if past creative work had been a waste of time. No. Nothing is ever wasted. It’s hard not to feel that way, hard not to wonder at what might have been, almost impossible not to trace back over our supposed failures. Yet every creative project we’ve made becomes compost for the next work—even the projects that have been “successful.” The future cannot be born without the past. We cannot know how our past work is laying the foundation for what is to come. Whatever we have done enriches our creative soil, and nothing ever dies. It returns in new forms, it shifts into deeper expressions, it takes us to unexpected places that we could not have reached without the compost of the past.
I am not sure where everything is heading right now, and by everything I mean my creative life. But have I ever been sure? Wouldn’t I rather dance on the precipice of possibility?
If you are mourning creative projects (and I don’t know many creatives who don’t have something they’ve grieved), please know you’re not alone. Sometimes this process is a bewildering tangle, an impossible thicket. Just remember that when you are in the muddle, you don’t know how the past can come back to life. What you’ve done is not gone, it’s not really locked away. It will breathe through you again, either in its current shape, or in new form. Creativity never really dies. Keep letting it live in you.