Endings
It is easy for me to begin things but hard for me to end things.
Except with chess - I rush towards the end game… (but I am a terrible chess player)
Ritual Endings
I always feel that I need some sort of bed time ritual. I have morning rituals but I dont have night time rituals. Night time reminds me of endings, the ending of the day. But maybe I should think of it as the beginning of the night.
Anyway I have been experimenting with night time rituals, brushing teeth and washing my face is not enough. I experimented with journalling, a bullet list of what I did today and a prediction of the bullet list for tomorrow. It did not last for a variety of reasons.
I recently beautifully ended a collaboration. We got together with the idea of starting a business related to covid, the market moved faster than we did, we tried to pivot and my collaboration said let’s end it. Notice I did not say that… because its hard for me to end things.
Rewrite Retro
What did I learn from the rewrite? It felt good to do… in my body. At times it felt exhausting to do… in my body. At times I felt I did not have much to (re) write so I wrote less, at times I felt I had a lot to write, so I wrote more. Sometimes I felt I want to write clearly, sometimes elliptically, sometimes poetically, sometimes cryptically.
I don’t want to end the rewrite, which makes me think that perhaps this is a good place to stop.
Those of you that have read this newsletter, hearted, commented, or mentioned it. Thank you. The hardest thing about writing a newsletter via a blog is that you know people are receiving it, you are actually writing for people, but you cannot interact directly with anyone reading it. With a blog you can pretend you are only writing for you.
What was the goal of this project? To see if my process could become my product, to explore the relationship between creating and reflecting, and to overcome by newsletter backlog.
What Will Happen Next?
Well… I will start up again my weekly newsletter over at system poetics. I may in a month or so start up this newsletter again for a month but focus on imaginative literature such as poetry… Or I may use it to serially release works in progress and aggressively use the rewrites to edit… But this is an ending not a pause, so I am not going to promise anything.
Anyway I was surfing facebook
And I found this clip that my friend Leon posted. Leon used to run a myers briggs meetup in NYC and is a multi talented artist. Like me he is also a classical guitarist and he posted Paola Hermosin’s youtube channel - which I have been obsessively watching.
I also saw a post from a high school classmate who I have not spoken with since I left high school but wrote a fantastic piece analyzing diversity in mid career professionals in Journalism.
Thank you so much for taking this trip with me.
xo
Meredith