It's not necessary to "finish"
I love going through old notes and journals, because occasionally I run across something I wrote that is relevant to something current in my life at the moment. And, if I'm not busy *facepalming* because I'm having to learn the same lesson all over again, it's a chance to put two and two together to make a memorable four.
During spring cleaning, I found some stuff I wrote during the months before my layoff, when I was trying to re-evaluate my life and job and figure out what to do next. To wit: "ALSO: I don't have to 'finish' one thing before going onto the next. My tidy mind, my sense of symmetry, would like this, but it's often the case that something has to be left undone. Esp. at a job, where continuously ongoing [anyway]."
This is something I've been considering in a different context, lately: that of the gap between singleness and being in a long-term romance. I've been content as a single woman, in many ways, but there have also been fears and anxieties with which I have struggled. There is a sense in which I wish I'd mastered being a whole, confident, complete person before I ever found my soulmate. To quote Buffy from the finale of her show, "I'm cookies. I'm not done yet."
And yet...I'm also rapidly coming to the conclusion that, although it's a good idea to know who you are and what you love before embarking on the gift of yourself to a spouse (or even a potential spouse), it's also true that the best romances show you parts of yourself that you never knew were there, give you the opportunity to be whole in ways you never could before, and make you more yourself than you ever thought you could be.
I don't have to have had a brilliant single life to have a wondrous romance.
And my cookies don't have to be done to give them away--it's more fun to bake with two, anyway.
During spring cleaning, I found some stuff I wrote during the months before my layoff, when I was trying to re-evaluate my life and job and figure out what to do next. To wit: "ALSO: I don't have to 'finish' one thing before going onto the next. My tidy mind, my sense of symmetry, would like this, but it's often the case that something has to be left undone. Esp. at a job, where continuously ongoing [anyway]."
This is something I've been considering in a different context, lately: that of the gap between singleness and being in a long-term romance. I've been content as a single woman, in many ways, but there have also been fears and anxieties with which I have struggled. There is a sense in which I wish I'd mastered being a whole, confident, complete person before I ever found my soulmate. To quote Buffy from the finale of her show, "I'm cookies. I'm not done yet."
And yet...I'm also rapidly coming to the conclusion that, although it's a good idea to know who you are and what you love before embarking on the gift of yourself to a spouse (or even a potential spouse), it's also true that the best romances show you parts of yourself that you never knew were there, give you the opportunity to be whole in ways you never could before, and make you more yourself than you ever thought you could be.
I don't have to have had a brilliant single life to have a wondrous romance.
And my cookies don't have to be done to give them away--it's more fun to bake with two, anyway.