Letting go…of trying to finish all unfinished business

Is this for real? Am I still thinking and writing about my incomplete writing strewn around my home, computer and head? Why did I get into this in the first place? Why was it so important to me?  

 

Maybe looking at an unfinished piece makes me feel unaccomplished; maybe it feels as if I quit; maybe it makes me feel like I didn’t have enough grit or gumption to see it through. And that may be hard for a rather tenacious person like me.

Or perhaps I am mourning the lack or loss of energy, excitement and enthusiasm that pervaded at the beginning of the project. And so with surgical precision, I either want to finish it or toss it away permanently.

But life doesn’t always work like that.

 

My eight-year old has been knitting a scarf for over two years now. The colorful unfinished yarn lies beneath the coffee table ignored and dejected. Every now and then she picks it up and knits a row. Each time I see it languishing there, I twitch a little.

 

The bright colored yarn has been knitted to a good length. She could finish the project in a mere few days if she chose. Every time the thick vibrant yarn catches my eye, I am tempted to pick it up, knit for an hour and be done with the matter. Forever. But no, the mother in me cannot find that acceptable. So I continue to twitch each time I see it.

 

I try to sneak it in her bag when we go places. I try to remind her how excited she was about the project. How we had gone to the store and how she had picked the bright (and ahem… rather ugly) colored yarn. It was fat and soft just the way she wanted it; with the “fat” needles to make the fat and fluffy scarf. But my persuasion falls on deaf ears and she always has something more interesting to do. The knitting fever in her classroom had probably ended and so the fate of the unfinished scarf looms precariously.

 

Until I decided to settle the matter (Ahem… such determination normally does not bode well for our family - and I should have known better). I decided that the yarn had lived under the table long enough. So I told my daughter she had two choices: either to finish knitting the darn thing or I was simply going to unravel it and begin a new project with it. That way she would never have to worry about completing it.

But the only thing the eight-year-old heard was that I was going to unravel the whole thing and she was devastated. “You can’t do that!” Fat tears began to roll down her cheeks and she whimpered out some more unintelligible protests. “I’ve worked so hard. I knitted so much”. I felt ruthless and cruel standing there a monster threatening to unravel the poor child’s hard work.

So I backed off and told her I wasn’t going to unravel it but would like her to complete the project. Those of you who thought my plan was rather harsh and even extreme, I agree with you. I am not particularly proud of it either.

I realize that not everything in our life can be taken care of with surgical precision. There will always be unfinished business in our life. And I want to learn to be okay with it. To not twitch as much about it or try to fix it all.

Each of us has some form of that ugly scarf in our life – be it a relationship, a project, a dream… and we just have to learn to live with the incompleteness.