The Polyhaiku Construct: simple. complex. pending. ended. Finishing what I have started.

For as long as I can remember I have been filled with ideas, occasionally gifted enough to bring them to life, and very rarely completing them. Usually I get overtaken by a new idea and move on, or get so obsessed with making things perfect that I become stuck in this loop of re-doing over and over. I love “concept.” I love process. I have come to realize that I never loved the completing because I was never satisfied with my own work. If I was busy thinking or researching or making that was fine, but it was never good enough at the end.

I have been working on the idea of contentment. Maybe I should call that the doctrine of contentment instead. Willfully trying to change some of my beliefs in order to assess myself honestly. Faithfully recognizing the responsibility to treat whatever giftedness I have with honesty. When I finish making something, I don’t have to stand back and evaluate it against perfection. I don’t have to weigh it against what someone else may think. I don’t have to make a judgment about whether it is worthy. What I am learning is that I can step away at the moment of completion, appreciate the process of making which I just passed through, and enjoy that I can see or hear this tangible result. Actually stop and enjoy it, keep that moment for a while.

The Polyhaiku Construct is my label for finishing all those loose ends I have sitting around because I could never let them go. The word “polyhaiku” represents for me the idea of multiple layers of simple things that jump back and forth between complexity and simplicity. It was a word I used to describe a series of work I did in grad school exploring how those two interact. The word “construct” holds that same meaning but with a sense of action, of doing. This project is about doing—taking a number of unfinished pieces of art, and songs, and writing and completing them. Rediscovering where I was, moving through the process, and then getting to that point of stepping away and saying, “I’m done, and I like where I went with this.”

I revisited my massive “box” of things in the making and sorted out  21 uncompleted artworks, 21 unfinished songs, and 21 chapters of half-done writing. I am going to try to complete one from each of these every two to three weeks. If I do it, at the end of one year I will have gathered up the past, have all of this finished stuff, and be able to move on into something new for the last part of my life. I suspect that as I do this I will get sidetracked in numerous ways and discover more things I want to conclude, and make lists of new things I want to try. But all of this “pending” will become “ended”—and I am wondering where the “ended” will take me.